Abstract Emerging pervasive information and computational environments require a content‐based middleware infrastructure that is scalable, self‐managing, and asynchronous. In this paper, we propose associative rendezvous (AR) as a paradigm for content‐based decoupled interactions for pervasive grid applications. We also present Meteor, a content‐based middleware infrastructure to support AR interactions. The design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of Meteor are presented. Evaluations include experiments using deployments on a local area network, the wireless ORBIT testbed at Rutgers University, and the PlanetLab wide‐area testbed, as well as simulations. Evaluation results demonstrate the scalability, effectiveness, and performance of Meteor to support pervasive grid applications. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The ability to efficiently discover information using partial knowledge (for example keywords, attributes or ranges) is important in large, decentralized, resource sharing distributed environments such as computational grids and peer-to-peer (P2P) storage and retrieval systems. This paper presents a P2P information discovery system that supports flexible queries using partial keywords and wildcards, and range queries. It guarantees that all existing data elements that match a query are found with bounded costs in terms of number of messages and number of peers involved. The key innovation is a dimension reducing indexing scheme that effectively maps the multidimensional information space to physical peers. The design, implementation and experimental evaluation of the system are presented.