INS/Twine: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Intentional Resource Discovery

The decreasing cost of computing technology is speeding the deployment of abundant ubiquitous computation and communication. With increasingly large and dynamic computing environments comes the challenge of scalable resource discovery, where client applications search for resources (services, devices, etc.) on the network by describing some attributes of what they are looking for. This is normally achieved through directory services (also called resolvers), which store resource information and resolve queries. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of INS/Twine, an approach to scalable intentional resource discovery, where resolvers collaborate as peers to distribute resource information and to resolve queries. Our system maps resources to resolvers by transforming descriptions into numeric keys in a manner that preserves their expressiveness, facilitates even data distribution and enables efficient query resolution. Additionally, INS/Twine handles resource and resolver dynamism by treating all data as soft-state.