iSLP: Resource Discovery on the Internet with Service Location Protocol
draft-kempf-slp-rescap-00

Abstract

The danger in defining a new protocol specifically for discovering resources on the Internet is that, like DNS, the protocol would probably be deployed internally as well. Developers would then have the opportunity to use the protocol to perform service discovery on the client side by downloading resources and inferencing over them rather than using protocols such as Service Location Protocol (SLP) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that inference on the server side. Besides the increased amount of network traffic involved in transferring attributes rather than the smaller query, every client would need to incorporate its own inferencing code. In this document, we discuss how the requirements for wide area resource discovery can be met by slightly modifying SLP to remove features more appropriate for internal networks and by establishing a few naming conventions. An added benefit of this design is that Internet clients can perform service discovery as well as simple resource discovery. It should be noted the proposals in this document are not meant to suggest that SLP is the only or even the best candidate for Internet resource discovery among existing protocols. The point of this paper is to emphasize the need for a concerted effort to make an existing discovery or directory services protocol fill the Internet resource discovery niche, rather than inventing yet another protocol offering discovery or directory services capabilites.

Authors

James Kempf

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)