Efficient In-band Service Announcement Through IPv6 Address Encoding

The announcement and discovery of network services represents one of the most important functionalities in today’s networks. In order to find and use services provided by remote systems, service management and dedicated service discovery protocols are used. These mechanisms introduce, however, additional overhead, especially in resource-constrained environments such as sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an in-band service announcement mechanism through IPv6 address encoding. In this scheme, IPv6’s large address space is used by a system to encode its service information into the host part of its IPv6 address. This information can then be extracted and efficiently used by other systems, allowing for service announcement without the need for additional protocols.