A yellow-pages service for a local-area network

Abstract

We introduce a yellow-pages service that maps service names into server addresses. The service is novel in that it associates a set of attributes with each server. Clients specify the attributes the server should possess when requesting a service and the yellow-pages service determines what servers satisfy the request. In addition to describing the implementation of the yellow-pages service within a local-area network, we show how the service can be integrated with the available internet communication protocols to enable clients from throughout the internet to access local servers.