Service Location Protocol for Enterprise Networks

The apparently simple matter of finding things is an important issue in today's growing enterprise networks. Computer users often need to locate not only people on a network but also devices such as printers or file servers, but are unable to do so without help from system administrators, or in-depth technical knowledge of their office network. A good service finder empowers users to find and use resources in the network without being network technology experts. This text provides a description and implementation of the service finder technology, called Service Location Protocol (SLP). It describes existing solutions for service discovery and presents the emerging solution (SLP), which is discussed from an architectural and implementary perspective. Furthermore, it presents the advantages of SLP over past solutions such as LDAP, and discusses the C and Java implementations of the protocol.