Session-based service discovery in peer-to-peer communications

The paper presents an approach for service discovery in session-based peer-to-peer communications. It is an approach by which service discovery can be securely extended into the Internet domain for spontaneous collaborative applications, secure in that services are only available during the period of time that the session is in place. An implementation of the approach is presented that demonstrates the integration of the IETF service location protocol (SLP) with the IETF session initiation protocol (SIP). In order to do this, SIP SDP (session description protocol) specifications had to be developed for SLP and a peer-to-peer model for SLP was also developed. The proposed methodology can also be used to share services from local wireless personal area networks (WPAN) like Bluetooth. In order to demonstrate this, a Bluetooth-SLP gateway was developed as well as a SIP SDP for Bluetooth OBEX profiles.