Service Matching Mechanisms in Pervasive Computing Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing syntactic level service matching mechanisms such as Jini, UPnP, etc., are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. But semantic reasoning is a costly task; meanwhile service discovery should context aware in ubiquitous computing environments, so it should provide optimization of semantic matching algorithm and context-aware service matching. This paper first compares syntactic service matching and semantic service matching then analyzes how to optimize semantic service matching and how to provide context-aware service matching in order to efficient and effective service discovery in pervasive computing environments. Through analyzing the shortcomings of the algorithms, and giving optimization service matching algorithms in environments may be designed.