Achieving eventual leader election in WS-discovery

Abstract

The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) provides the foundation for seamless deployment, autonomous configuration, and joint operation for various computing devices in environments ranging from simple personal multimedia setups and home automation to complex industrial equipment and large data centers. In particular, WS-Discovery provides dynamic rendezvous for clients and services embodied in such devices. Unfortunately, failure detection implicit in this standard is very limited, both by embodying static timing assumptions and by omitting liveness monitoring, leading to undesirable situations in demanding application scenarios. In this paper we identify these undesirable outcomes and propose an extension of WS-Discovery that allows failure detection to achieve eventual leader election, thus preventing them.