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 (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.

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)
• Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS)
• Jini for Java objects.
• Lightweight Service Discovery (LSD), for mobile ad hoc networks
• 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 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
• 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.

• Discoverability
• Semantic web

• Service Discovery S-Cube Knowledge Model
• Dong, H., Hussain, F.K., Chang, E.: Semantic Web Service matchmakers: State of the art and challenges[Online]. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 25(7) (May 2013) pp. 961–988. Accessed on June 16, 2015.
• Sun, L., Dong, H., Hussain, F.K., Hussain, O.K., Chang, E.: Cloud service selection: State-of-the-art and future research directions. Journal of Network and Computer Applications[Online] 45 (October 2014) pp. 134–150. Date accessed: 16 June 2015.