Short for Service Location Protocol (SLP) was originally an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards track protocol that provides a framework to allow networking applications to discover the existence, location, and configuration of networked services in enterprise networks. Traditionally, in order to locate services on the network, users of network applications have been required to supply the host name or network address of the machine that provides a desired service. SLP can eliminate the need for users to know the names of network hosts. With SLP, the user only needs to know the description of the service he is interested in. Based on this description, SLP is then able to return the URL of the desired service. [Source: An Introduction to SLP]
