Service discovery

A device joining a network must be able to find other devices in the network that can use the information it provides, or that can generate the information needed by the device to perform its own function. A node can use Service Discovery to find nodes with which it can communicate. Service Discovery is introduced in Section 3.4.6.

The node requests the required services from other nodes by means of a broadcast message that propagates throughout the network. Any node that has the requested services then unicasts a response back to the requesting node. This means that the requesting node may receive more than one response.

A response includes the network address of the remote node that contains the requested services. The node stores this address locally and the application can then use the address for all future communications to the remote node. This is referred to as direct addressing.

Alternatively, rather than using direct addressing in their communications, two nodes can communicate through the binding mechanism, described in Section 3.6.2 below.

Parent topic:Network communications