Overview and Some Terminology
UPNP or Universal Plug and Play is a set of networking protocols promoted by the UPNP forum. The intent of UPNP is to allow different networking devices to connect seamlessly via the local area network or the internet. Many companies have brought into the standard including Intel and Microsoft. UPNP is more widely supported on the pc platform than other platforms. The windows api provides for direct support of the protocol. There are 3rd party stacks available for linux and Mac OS X.
Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) is a UPnP protocol, used in Windows XP and several brands of network equipment.
Zeroconf and UPnP
Zeroconf also called Bonjour is an apple protocol built on top of Domain Name Service. DNS. ZeroConfig consists of Multicast Dns and DNS Service Discovery. (Dns-Sd). Bonjour is used in many apple products such as Itunes , Ichat and to discover network printers and devices. Apple has released a windows version of Bonjour, and there are third party Zeroconf utilities available for Linux. Bonjoir for windows uses the DnsResponder service. Bonjoir and Upnp Share many features, but also differ in significant ways summurized below.
- IPv4 Link-Local Addressing both Zeroconf and UPnP are identical at that layer.
- Multicast DNS UPnP doesn't have any alternative to offer.
- The only area of overlap is the service discovery layer.
