METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DECENTRALIZED DEVICE AND SERVICE DESCRIPTION AND DISCOVERY

A resource discovery and description mechanism for decentralized device and service description and discovery in networking environments is described that generates advertisements in a uniform description format to describe resources on a network. The mechanism may translate resource descriptions from other resource description and discovery protocols to generate the advertisements. The advertisements may be used for cross-network discovery and access of the resources. An advertisement may include, but is not limited to, physical endpoints, virtual endpoints, user-extensible metadata, location information, and a universal unique identifier (UUID) for the associated resource. If a resource cannot provide a UUID, the mechanism generates a UUID for the resource. One embodiment may support proxy nodes for generating advertisements for resources that cannot participate directly in the resource discovery and description mechanism. These proxy nodes may also serve as a proxy between local subnetwork discovery and cross-network discovery of the advertisements.