VPeers: A peer-to-peer service discovery framework for Virtual Manufacturing Organizations

We present VPeers, a peer-to-peer service discovery framework for a Virtual Manufacturing Organization (VMO). In our framework, each VPeer (a VMO member) publishes the services that it intends to share and maintains a list of friend VPeers that it has recently interacted with. When a VPeer receives a search query, it will first search its local services. If the search query is not satisfied locally, this VPeer will forward the query to its friend VPeers with an additional time constraint. This process continues recursively until the search query is fully satisfied or the time allowed by the constraint has elapsed. The features of the VPeers framework include: (1) a fully distributed search process; (2) a search query involving both string matches and range predicates; and (3) a ranking scheme that ranks search results by predefined quality measures. Our prototype implementation shows the feasibility of this approach.