Allia: Alliance-based Service Discovery for Ad-Hoc Environments

Static directory based service discovery is unsuitable for m-commerce in ad-hoc environments. In this paper, we present Allia: a peer-to-peer caching based and policy-driven agent-service discovery framework to facilitate cross-platform service discovery in ad-hoc environments for mobile electronic commerce applications. Our approach removes the problems associated with structured compound formation of agent communities in mobile commerce environment and achieves high degree of flexibility in adapting itself to the changes of the ad-hoc environment. Our framework takes into consideration device capabilities and limitations, user preferences regarding usage of the devices, application specifics with respect to mobile commerce and adapts accordingly. We also present an initial implementation of Allia over ThinkPads and iPAQs by extending the LEAP Agent Platform and using Bluetooth as the underlying network protocol.