A Comparison of Service Discovery Protocols and Implementation of the Service Location Protocol

With the raising number of Internet services, automatic service discovery will be a very important feature in future network scenarios, e.g., in self organizing ad hoc networks. With service discovery, devices may automatically discover network services including their properties, and services may advertise their existence in a dynamic way. This paper compares some well–known service discovery protocols currently under development, namely the Service Location Protocol (SLP), Jini, Salutation, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), and the Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP). Application scenarios for service discovery are presented, which emphasize the importance of these protocols. We also present our SLP beta implementation, which includes the fundamental protocol transactions and demonstrates IP service discovery in action.