universal plug-and-play (UPnP)
Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) is an architecture from Microsoft that supports communication between personalcomputers(PCs) and consumer electronics. UPnP can be used for universal networking in industrial networks and home networking. Thus for networking peripherals such as printers, scanners, control computers televisions, alarm systems, kitchen appliances, etc.
The goal of UPnP has a high demand which includes home networks and security systems, appliances and mobile devices, audio and video, gateway functions and quality of service. Various working groups are to implement this claim by developing appropriate standards.
Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) is platform and language independent and has a high degree of compactness and administrative freedom. The multi- layer UPnP architecture is supported by User Datagram Protocol( UDP) and TCP/ IP at the transport layer, and by HTTP and others at the application layer. The plug-and-play layer sits on top of the transport layer, which provides a few session services. The actual applications are in the top layer. UPnP is supported by various protocols; for example, an auto-IP protocol( APIPA), which is used to assign IP addresses dynamically. With this method, the switched-on device selects an IP address from a reserved range andchecks whether this is already being used in the network. If this is the case, another IP address is selected. Another important protocol of UPnP is the Simple Service Discovery Protocol( SSDP), which is based on HTTP and works platform-independently.
The physical layer of UPnP can be based on Ethernet, but can also work with wireless technologies, FireWire or via serial connections.