See also Plug and Play , an earlier, proprietary Microsoft approach.
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a standard that uses Internet and Web protocol
s to enable devices such as PCs, peripherals, intelligent appliances,
and wireless devices to be plugged into a network and automatically know
about each other. With UPnP, when a user plugs a device into the
network, the device will configure itself, acquire a TCP/IP address, and use a discovery protocol based on the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( HTTP
) to announce its presence on the network to other devices. For
instance, if you had a camera and a printer connected to the network and
needed to print out a photograph, you could press a button on the
camera and have the camera send a "discover" request asking if there
were any printers on the network. The printer would identify itself and
send its location in the form of a universal resource locator ( URL ).
