Service Discovery Protocols

drbrain@segment7.net (Eric Hodel) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:42:03 -0700

I’ve worked on two different service discovery libraries for ruby, one for SSPD and one for mDNS, and I’d like to share the differences between them with you.

Both SSDP and mDNS are designed to be used with self-configuring networks and to automatically discover and connect to other devices. Both use multicast to advertise and search.

SSPD

The Simple Service Discovery Protocol is used primarily by UPnP for network devices to discover each other. UPnP is designed for consumer electronics and appliances that need to communicate with each other automatically.

The description of SSPD fits on a twelve of pages when written in (relatively) plain English (section 1 in the UPNP Device Architecture). The protocol itself looks much like HTTP and can be implemented largely using simple text processing. (Strangely, SOAP is the higher-level communication layer for UPnP.)

Unfortunately there’s no way for multiple devices to share the same SSPD socket without being designed to work with each other. Since UPnP is focused on simple devices, this fits well with their design goals. Most UPnP devices are routers, media servers, game consoles, televisions, etc. If you built your own router and media server on the same host it will probably be impossible for both devices to show up on the network, nor will you be able to run a media server and media viewer on the same host without the two being designed to work with each other.

mDNS

Multicast DNS is used primarily by Apple and (basically) has a DNS server on each host. Hosts speak the DNS protocol to each other over multicast and have a central daemon that handles communication on the network much like the libc DNS resolver.

Even though there’s plenty of DNS clients around for code reuse, implementing a DNS client form scratch is a large undertaking (my SSDP implementation is around 750 lines with documentation, ruby’s Resolv DNS resolver is around 2200 lines and doesn’t include a server or multicast code). The entirety of the DNS system is spread across several RFCs, not including the documentation for mDNS itself.

Fortunately mDNS libraries provide a daemon for handling network communication and a client library you can use to register and browse for devices (the dnssd gem uses Apple’s DNS Service Discovery API). mDNS is focused on computers rather than devices, so multiple services can all coexist on the same host.

Unfortunately, due to the complexity of mDNS, there’s no single API for applications to use. Apple’s DNS-SD works across multiple platforms including windows. For unix-like operating systems there is also avahi which has a limited dnssd compatibility shim.

Segment7: Service Discovery Protocols

Service Discovery Protocols

SSPD

mDNS