Service Location Protocol: Automatic Discovery of IP Network Services

portable and networks larger and more pervasive, the need to automate the location and client configuration for network services also increases. The Service Location Protocol is an IETF standard that provides a scalable framework for automatic resource discovery on IP networks. T he complexity of configuring every element in the network—clients, servers, peers, and infrastructure—is a key problem facing network technology's advance. As long as configuration remains difficult, network administration will be expensive, tedious, and troublesome, and users will be unable to take advantage of the full range of capabilities networked systems could provide. The Service Location Protocol 1 is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard for enabling network-based applications to automatically discover the location—including address or domain name and other configuration information—of a required service. Clients can connect to and make use of services using SLP. Currently, without SLP, service locations must be manually configured or entered into a configuration file. SLP provides for fully decentralized operation and scales from small, unadministered networks to large enterprise networks with policies dictating who can discover which resources. This article describes SLP's operation and how it adapts to conditions where infrastructure is not available, where administration is minimal, or where network administrators simply wish to reduce workload.