Autoconfiguration for IP networking: enabling local communication

IP hosts and network infrastructure have historically been difficult to configure, but emerging networking protocols promise to enable hosts to establish IP networks without prior configuration or network services. Even very simple devices with few computing resources will be able to communicate via standard protocols wherever they are attached. Current IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standardization efforts, such as those in the Zeroconf Working Group, aim to make this form of networking simple and inexpensive. In this tutorial, I examine the background, current status and future prospects for zero-configuration networking.