Network mobility support for Web Service-based Grids through the Session Initiation Protocol

The concept of mobility has undergone a deep evolution from the traditional idea of terminal mobility to the broader concept of service mobility. Next Generation Networks support mobility for users as a key feature. In a similar way, Next Generation Grids need to support mobility for services in order to actually become pervasive and ubiquitous. Thus, the utilization of the features already offered by the network is desirable in order to avoid duplication of functionality and to ease development. This paper describes an approach based on the utilization of the SIP-based network signaling infrastructure by the Grid application layer that allows the location, invocation and real-time context awareness of services no matter where they are running in. Implementation details are given and the Akogrimo project is presented as a proof of concept.