Service Discovery

Summary. Service discovery deals with locating services which can be used to accomplish a task. For example discovering a printer to print documents on, or locating a shop offering the service of hairdressing. When you locate a service you usually obtain an address which you use to invoke the o.ered service. Here in this chapter we will start by looking at an example of service discovery from human life, with a short story of a pizza restaurant which o.ers the service of baking pizzas and see how customers can discover it. Next, we will have a look at how those methods from the pizza-story can be applied in computer networks. Finally, an introduction to UPnP is given as an example of a service discovery system.