  Discovery Systems (DS) can be considered as entry points for global loosely
coupled distributed systems. An efficient Discovery System in essence increases
the performance, reliability and decision making capability of distributed
systems. With the rapid increase in scale of distributed applications, existing
solutions for discovery systems are fast becoming either obsolete or incapable
of handling such complexity. They are particularly ineffective when handling
service lifetimes and providing up-to-date information, poor at enabling
dynamic service access and they can also impose unwanted restrictions on
interfaces to widely available information repositories. In this paper we
present essential the design characteristics, an implementation and a
performance analysis for a discovery system capable of overcoming these
deficiencies in large, globally distributed environments.
