This document describes a new service discovery protocol called ICMPv6SD that is designed to address some limitations of UPnP/SSDP in home networks. ICMPv6SD utilizes the advantages of IPv6 and ICMPv6 to provide a more compact and efficient discovery protocol. It reorganizes the SSDP message format to fit the ICMPv6 message format for lighter encoding. It also applies data compression using Huffman coding to further reduce message sizes. Experimental results show ICMPv6SD can significantly reduce the number of messages and amount of network traffic compared to SSDP, especially as the number of devices increases in the home network.

1. 2019 International Conference on Platform Technology and Service
(PlatCon-19)
ICMPv6SD: A Compact Service Discovery
Protocol Supporting Plug-and-Play in Home
Networks
Author: Zi-Chao Lin [1] and Chun-Feng Liao [1,2]
Department of Computer Science [1]
Program in Digital Content and Technologies [2]
National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

2. Outline
• Introduction
• Background and Related Works
• Protocol Design
• Evaluation
• Conclusion
2

3. Introduction
• Pervasive Computing Environment
– Many applications have been developed till now
– Integration of heterogeneous hardware and software
• UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
– Apply Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) to achieve
the presence management
– Operating Systems and Programming Language
independence
• Two roles in UPnP network
– Device and Control Point
3

4. Objective
• Problem
• Neglect to fully apply features of IPv6
– Concentrate on the compatibility of address, but IPv6 also improves ICMP and
multicast schemes
• Network flooding
– UPnP/SSDP depends on UDP which is unreliable and often loses packets
– Specification suggest sending packets more than one time but usually causes
useless traffic
• Redundant information
– SSDP consists of several pairs of key and value
» MAN field and “ssdp:discover”
» Only five different values in MAN field
– SSDP transmits messages in plain text
4

5. Objective
• Solution: ICMPv6SD
– A compact service discovery protocol based on ICMPv6
• Utilize the advantages of IPv6 and ICMPv6
• Use simple ICMPv6 message format to reduce the complexity
• Make the smart home network more scalable and robust
5

6. Background: ICMPv6
• ICMPv6 is the latest version of ICMP
– Defined in RFC 4443
– Responsible for error reporting and transmitting the status
message of the node
• General Message Format:
6

7. Related Works
• A bridge for control points and devices can interoperate
between IPv4 and IPv6
• Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP)
– Defined in RFC 4861
• Use ICMPv6 message format
• Address Resolution, Neighbor Unreachability Detection, Duplicate
Address Resolution, and so on
– Analyze the security of NDP and how to protect NDP against
attack
• In light of NDP, we use ICMPv6 message format to design a
new service discovery protocol
7
[Li et al, 2008]
[Zhang and Wang 2016]

8. Protocol Design
• Protocol overview
– Lightweight Encoding
• Reorganize SSDP message format to meet ICMPv6 message format
– Data Compression
• Compress message by Huffman coding algorithm
– Monitoring Tool
• Observe the traffic of the network to troubleshoot
8

9. • Lightweight Encoding
– Reorganize SSDP message format to meet ICMPv6 message
format
– Determine the value of the field from the message type
9
Protocol Design

10. Protocol Design
• Data Compression
– Some fields still haven’t been encoded
• Specific to most devices and control points
• Too lengthy and diverse to encode
– Apply Huffman algorithm to the fields
10

11. Protocol Design: Detail Huffman
11

12. Protocol Design
• Monitoring Tool
– Message contents are not human-readable after
lightweight encoding and data compression
– Lua-based Wireshark plugin
12

13. Analytical Evaluation
• Message Reduction Ratio (MRR)
– If our proposed protocol is more effective in reducing
message transmission, MRR will close to one
13

14. Analytical Evaluation
• Throughput Gain (TG)
– TG is positive only if ICMPv6SD decreases the message count
and has smaller message size
14

15. Evaluation: Experiments
15
• Message counts
– Descriptions
• Message counts when the devices
and control points under different
protocols
– Results
• Values of MRR is are least 0.9
• ICMPv6SD can effectively reduces
the number of messages

16. Evaluation: Experiments
• Message size
– Descriptions
• Message size under different
protocols with the same amount of
information
– Results
• TG has escalating trend when the
number of nodes increases
• The original SSDP spends more
network resources than ICMPv6SD
16

17. Conclusion
• This work presents a new compact service discovery
protocol: ICMPv6SD
– Take advantages of ICMPv6
– Reduce unnecessary duplication and compress message body
– Develop a Monitoring tool helps developers to troubleshoot
• The experimental results show ICMPv6SD better:
– Reduce number of messages
– Reduce a large number of useless bytes
• Future work
– Deploy to a mixed IPv6 and IPv4 environment
– Investigate the feasibility of deploying to nodes with 6LowPAN 17

18. Q & A
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