Peer-to-peer content discovery and aggregation in heterogeneous networks: Master's thesis

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the increasing number of networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Nowadays it is common that a user has many terminals capable of providing the user with a variety of services. The problem is how to bring these terminals to work in union to serve the user better. On the other hand, it is common that many places, like airports and libraries, offer users a network connection. This network connection usually provides the user with access to the Internet, but there is no common method for accessing local services in the network. Users of the network could provide each other with services and the connection provider could also have some extra value – like a printer – to offer the users, or maybe he would like to advertise some services. In this work a peer-to-peer content discovery and aggregation architecture has been designed with a practical design approach. The architecture enables a user to easily form his personal area network – to connect his networked terminals with each other to combine their services into a single node of a network. The architecture also provides the user with an instant view of and access to services provided in a network and allows mobility of these extendable nodes. A requirement analysis of such an architecture was carried out by a literature review and by identifying the problems with such an architecture by examining an example scenario. An example architecture was designed based on the requirements and the designed architecture was validated by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation and, based on the implementation, issues for future research in this area were found.