Adapting WS-Discovery for Use in Tactical Networks

摘要

The NATO Network Enabled Capabilities (NNEC) feasibility study has identified Web services as a key enabling technology for NNEC. The technology is founded on a number of civil standards, ensuring interoperability across different operating systems and programming languages. This also makes the technology a natural choice for interoperability also in multinational civil- military operations, where a large number of heterogeneous systems need to exchange information. Web services provide loose coupling and late binding, which are desirable properties in such a setting. Discovering available services in an operation is essential, and the discovery process must leverage standards to ensure interoperable information exchange. WS-Discovery is a standard for Web services discovery suited for dynamic environments and civil networks, but has high overhead and is not so suitable for tactical networks. Like the other Web services standards, it uses XML for encoding messages. In civil networks bandwidth is abundant, but in tactical networks XML may incur unacceptable overhead. However, the W3C has created a specification for efficient XML interchange (EXI), which reduces XML overhead by defining a binary interchange format. This paper investigates the performance gains (in terms of reduced bandwidth) that can be achieved by combining the WS-Discovery standard with the EXI specification.