Patent attributes
System and method for decentralized entity presence are described. Presence services may collaborate to form a presence service view on the network. A node providing an entity on the network may provide an entity advertisement to a presence service to advertise the entity's presence on the network. The presence information may be indexed locally by a presence service, and the indexes may be shared with one or more other presence services within the presence service view. A presence service may accept queries from nodes for a specific entity, and walk the query within the presence service view to locate the target entity. The query may then be forwarded to the node advertising the presence entity. The node providing the entity may respond directly to the querying node without going through the presence service. A presence contract may then be negotiated between the nodes without going through the presence service.
