mSLP-mesh-enhanced service location protocol

The service location protocol (SLP), a proposed IETF standard, provides a flexible and scalable service discovery framework for IP networks. It can be deployed with or without a directory service. This paper presents mSLP, the mesh-enhanced service location protocol. mSLP enhances SLP with a fully-meshed peer directory agent (DA) architecture. Peer DAs exchange service registration information, and maintain the same consistent data for shared scopes. mSLP improves the reliability and consistency of SLP directory services. It also greatly simplifies service agent (SA) registrations in systems with multiple DAs. mSLP is backward compatible with SLPv2 and can be deployed incrementally