Service discovery
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 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.
Protocols
There are many service discovery protocols, including:- Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP)
- Bonjour, e.g., Apple AirPrint
- DNS Service Discovery, a component of zero-configuration networking
- DNS, as used for example in Kubernetes
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ; its classification as a service discovery protocol is controversial
- Internet Storage Name Service
- Jini for Java objects.
- Lightweight Service Discovery, for mobile ad hoc networks
- Link Layer Discovery Protocol standards-based neighbor discovery protocol similar to vendor-specific protocols which find each other by advertising to vendor-specific broadcast addresses, such Cabletron and Cisco Discovery Protocol.
- Local Peer Discovery, or Local Service Discovery
- Multicast Source Discovery Protocol, usually used for unicast exchange of multicast source information between anycast Rendez-Vous Points to service mcast clients.
- Service Advertising Protocol used in Novell NetWare networks with IPX
- Service Location Protocol
- Session Announcement Protocol used to discover RTP sessions
- Simple Service Discovery Protocol, a component of Universal Plug and Play
- Universal Description Discovery and Integration for web services
- Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol
- WS-Discovery
- XMPP Service Discovery
- XRDS (eXtensible Resource Descriptor Sequence) used by XRI, OpenID, OAuth, etc.