Industry Need Addressed: The design of future commercial distributed software systems that employ service discovery in uncertain, dynamic environments will demand new analysis approaches and tools. Numerous industry trends foretell a future where software components will need to discover other network services and applications in a distributed environment characterized by dynamic modification, recomposition, and change in topology. Recently a number of commercial Service Discovery Protocols have emerged that enable dynamic elements in a network to discover each other and to collaborate in order to meet an application need. To assist in developing new tools and approaches to the design and analysis of such systems, we investigate the use of architectural modeling techniques to improve analysis of specifications.

NIST/ITL Approach: NIST/ITL is working with interested parties in industry to analyze critical aspects of service discovery protocols in a series of studies. The approach used in these studies entails constructing architectural models of selected aspects of discovery protocol specifications. Relevant properties are specified for the protocols to satisfy in order to demonstrate a desirable quality of service, and metrics are defined for comparing the model behavior. Using the properties and metrics as a basis, the models are then analyzed to yield information about the utility of service discovery protocol designs under dynamic conditions.

Impact: NIST/ITL, through a series of publications describing the results of these studies, provides critical information to developers of commercial service discovery protocols about new approaches to improving the quality of their specifications using architectural modeling techniques. In the future, we plan to expand this study to encompass quality and robustness of large-scale grid computing systems under hostile and volatile conditions..