Concept and implementation of an emulation environment for distributed service discovery

The number of services offered by different devices to the end users has significantly increased. There are different approaches and ways in which the services can be brought to the end user. Services used with as minimal overhead as possible are usually preferred. There are several aspects that must be considered in order to achieve this. The way in which services are discovered by the users is one of these aspects. Services operate in various environments: home environment, office environment etc. These usually put some specific requirements to the service discovery. For example, an environment with many mobile devices may emphasise power saving characteristics of the service discovery approach as a trade off to the service discovery speed. The question which therefore arises is whether it is possible to meet the requirement of an environment in advance. There are two extremes among the approaches used for investigating such kind of questions. A modelling of the service discovery protocol characteristics followed by a simulation is used most often. Another extreme is the practical evaluation of the service discovery protocol in usually large scale environments with hundreds services and terminal devices. This requires high implementation and integration effort. It also worth mentioning that they are often intractable. The objective of the current work is to design and implement an emulation framework which fills the gap between theoretical simulations and physical implementations. It reuses existing service discovery protocol implementations and imitates services' and users' behaviour. The framework proposed in this thesis extends a real network environment through virtual emulated services. Thereby the performance of service discovery protocols can be explored with real terminal devices. It may be user-defined by the size of the enhanced service environment. Furthermore, the framework delivers statistical information about the service discovery protocol under consideration. The framework is also deployed to evaluate the design and implementation of the service environments before their complete practical realization of the environment.