Broker Discovery

Protocol

There is a need for a way to discover brokers on a network. Current methods for discovering devices are complicated to implement. This Broker Discovery Protocol is very simple to understand and implement.

All communication is over UDP with the address as 239.255.255.230 and the port as 1900.

Packet Layout

Each packet is just a textual message. We do not need a special packet structure. Discovering brokers is a very simple and quick process.

The message format is TYPE [ARGUMENT], where type is required and argument is optional.

DISCOVER

To discover brokers on the local network, you send the DISCOVER message.

DISCOVER

BROKER

For a broker to announce itself, it sends a BROKER message with the connection url as the argument. It should send it in a unicast message to the address of the issuer of the DISCOVER message. If there are multiple brokers on a given IP with a different port, that is fine.

BROKER http://192.168.2.53:8080/conn