ABSTRACT
Recent advances in embedded systems, microelectronics, and wireless communication technologies have increased the flexibility of using mobile devices for various practical applications that improve the personal productivity of users. Mobile devices, however, are still resource poor in comparison with computing resources in network infrastructures (NIs), such as the Internet, grid, and enterprise computing environments. Such NIs usually consist of non-mobile computing resources to provide highperformance computing and communication capabilities. Although these NIs have become more flexible and interoperable by adopting a serviceoriented architecture (SOA) [1], which can enable rapid composition of distributed applications regardless of the programming languages and platforms used in developing and running different components of the applications, it is still very difficult for these NIs to provide the desired flexibility to individual users, especially to mobile users, due to their immobility and large size. Hence, dynamic integration of mobile devices with NIs [2] is a subject in ubiquitous computing that has attracted much attention. Dynamic integration is the process by which a mobile device can detect, communicate with, and use the required services in nearby NIs in an application-transparent way. The benefit of dynamic integration is that the applications in both a mobile devices and an NI can interoperate with each other as if a mobile device itself is an integral part of the NI or
vice versa
[2]. The dynamic integration of mobile devices and NIs has raised a number of research issues, such as wireless
ad hoc
communication, service discovery and coordination, and distributed trust management. In this chapter, our discussion is focused on techniques for service discovery and coordination for the dynamic integration of mobile devices with service-based NIs.
