Service discovery

This article is about a type of network protocols. For the multimedia session initiation protocol, see Session Description Protocol.

Service discovery is the process of automatically detecting devices and services on a computer network. It aims to reduce the manual configuration effort required from users and administrators. A service discovery protocol (SDP) is a network protocol that helps accomplish service discovery.

Service discovery requires a common language to allow software agents to make use of one another's services without the need for continuous user intervention.^[1]

Protocols

There are many service discovery protocols, including:

• Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP)
• Bonjour, e.g., Apple AirPrint
• DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), a component of zero-configuration networking
• DNS, as used for example in Kubernetes
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP); its classification as a service discovery protocol is controversial
• Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS)
• Jini for Java objects.
• Lightweight Service Discovery (LSD), for mobile ad hoc networks ^[2]
• Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) standards-based neighbor discovery protocol similar to vendor-specific protocols which find each other by advertising to vendor-specific broadcast addresses (versus all-1's), such Cabletron (Enterasys) and Cisco Discovery Protocol (both referred to as CDP but different formats).
• Local Peer Discovery, or Local Service Discovery
• Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP), usually used for unicast exchange of multicast source information between anycast Rendez-Vous Points (RPs) to service mcast clients.
• Service Advertising Protocol used in Novell NetWare networks with IPX
• Service Location Protocol (SLP)
• Session Announcement Protocol (SAP) used to discover RTP sessions
• Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), a component of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
• Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) for web services
• Universal Service Discovery Protocol (USDP)
• Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD)
• WS-Discovery (Web Services Dynamic Discovery)
• XMPP Service Discovery (XEP-0030)
• XRDS (eXtensible Resource Descriptor Sequence) used by XRI, OpenID, OAuth, etc.

See also

• Discoverability
• Semantic web