Service Location Protocol (SLP)
Jack Caldwell
The exponential growth of hosts on the internet continues to provide an overwhelming array of services to clients and end users; however, finding the service that meets the client's criteria is somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack. Connecting to a specific service provider, like a mail server, requires explicit knowledge of the server's domain or IP address. Furthermore, the process of finding and selecting services cannot easily be automated -- for example, using a popular web engine to search for a specific URL that meets the client's criteria, or guessing at the domain name of an organization's web site by prepending 'www' to the name of the host, followed by a suffix that corresponds to a well-known top-level domain, like 'org' or 'com'. The Service Location Working Group, of the IETF, is currently in the process of specifying a dynamic self-discovery mechanism whereby clients can locate services without prior knowledge of where that service is located, or which servers provide the service attributes that meet the client's criteria.
This project will implement a prototype of the service location protocol for local area network. Java 1.1.5, which supports multicast sockets, will be the implementation language, and the prototype will be run in the Solaris 2.6 and Windows 95 environments.
Research Documentation (slp_project.pdf)
SLP Overview (SLPOverview.ppt)
SLP Code Package (SLP.tar.gz)
SLP Class Hierarchy (html)
Last Modified May 6, 1998