Service Location Working Group                              Erik Guttman
 Internet Draft                                    Sun Microsystems, Inc.
 Expires in six months


             Service Specific Multicast Address Assignment
              for use with the Service Location Protocol
               <draft-ietf-svrloc-service-mcast-00.txt>

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Abstract

   One feature of the Service Location Protocol is that Services may
   be assigned a Service Specific Multicast address to aid in service
   discovery.  Use of this address for service discovery will not
   burden systems which do not advertise the service type.  Two open
   questions are answered in the following proposal:  How are the
   multicast addresses to be assigned?  How are these multicast
   addresses known by SLP Service and User Agents?

1.0 Introduction

   SLP User Agents can request information about services by
   multicasting requests to service specific multicast addresses.
   Only Service Agents which have service information for these
   services will receive the request.  Other Service Agents will
   never receieve them, as the multicast request will be filtered out
   by the link layer.

   There are two unanswered questions which must be answered in order
   to successfully make use of Service Specific Multicast addresses.
   The first is how will new multicast addresses be assigned.  The
   second is how will new assignments be known and by UAs and SAs.

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Internet Draft      Multicast Address Assignment     12 February 1997

2.0 String Hashing of Service Types to Multicast Addresses

   A range of (for example) 1024 contiguous multicast addresses will
   be requested from IANA for use with service location.  The service
   specific multicast address is the string hash of the service's
   "service type" string identifier.  For example "nfs" would be
   hashed, then the last 10 significant bits of the hash would be
   used to determine the multicast address within the range.

   Service Specific Multicast addresses do not need to be unique in
   order to server their purpose.  If spurious requests arrive at an
   SA due to hashing collisions, the SA can always discard the
   request, as it would do anyway if it received a request on the
   Service Location General Multicast address.  What will occur is
   that SAs representing very few services will not receive nearly as
   many spurious requests as if all requests were made to the Service
   Location General Multicast address.

   This solves the assignment problem.  All service types, whether
   they are standardized or not, can be hashed into a particular
   multicast address.  Discovery of service types will now
   effectively also discover Service Specific Multicast addresses.
   Finally, the effort of standardizing new service types will be
   disassociated from that of Multicast Address assignements.  This
   will reduce the necessary interaction with the IANA required to
   standardize new service types.  It will also make it possible for
   nonstandard service types to make use of Service Specific
   Multicast addresses.  This simplification changes [SRV] and [SLP]=20
   which specify that these addresses are directly assigned by IANA. =20

   The string hash function is attributed to Chris Torek:=20

         unsigned long SLPhash(const char *pc) {
           unsigned long h =3D 0;
           for (; *pc; pc++) {
             h *=3D 33;
             h +=3D *pc;
           }
           return (0x2FF & h);  /* round to a range of 0-1023 */
         }

   The string which should be passed into this function is the
   service type string, as a null terminated ASCII string.  The
   service type will always be expressable as a string even if the
   service URL is in another character set.  That is because the
   grammar definition of a URL is such that all allowable characters
   in a URL are in a very restricted set of characters; all of which
   fall within the ASCII range.

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3.0 Security Considerations

   There are no security ramifications to mapping service type
   strings to multicast addresses.

4.0 Internationalization Considerations

   The service type string must be expressed in subset of the ASCII
   character set.  This is a restriction posed by the URL encoding
   standard [URL].  Unfortunately, this limits the representation of
   service type names, which will make it difficult to name services
   in languages which use characters outside of this restricted set.

5.0 Acknowledgments

   This internet draft spells out a proposal made by Thomas Narten
   last year to provide a simple and powerful solution to both
   multicast address assignment and disseminating knowledge of those
   assignments.

6.0 References

      [SLP]    J. Veizades, E. Guttman, C. Perkins & S. Kaplan,
               "Service Location Protocol", Work in progress,
               January 1997.

      [SRV]    E. Guttman, "The service: URL Scheme", Work in
               progress, November 1996.

      [URL]    T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter & M. McCahill,  "Uni-
               form Resource Locators (URL)", RFC 1738.  December
               1994.

7.0 Author's Address

         Erik Guttman

         Sun Microsystems, Inc.
         Gaisbergstr. 6
         D-69115 Heidelberg
         Germany

         Phone: +49 6221 601649
         Fax  : +49 6221 161019
         email: Erik.Guttman@eng.sun.com


      This memo expires on August 12, 1997

Guttman                                                        Page 3