Notification and Subscription for SLP

The Service Location Protocol (SLP) provides mechanisms whereby service agent clients can advertise and user agent clients can query for services. The design is very much demand-driven, so that user agents only obtain service information when they specifically ask for it. There exists another class of user agent applications, however, that requires notification when a new service appears or disappears. In the RFC 2608 design, these applications are forced to poll the network to catch changes. In this document, we describe a protocol for allowing such clients to be notified when a change occurs, removing the need for polling. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.