Service Discovery Protocol (SDP)

What is SDP?

Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) is a protocol that allows Bluetooth devices to discover the services that other Bluetooth devices are willing to share.

What can't SDP do?

SDP only allows the discovery of services on the server device that the client device can handle. This is unlike other protocols/technologies like JINI that go further - allowing the client to use the services on the server without knowing anything about the service beforehand.

In short - SDP is no more complex and has no more functionality than the Microsoft Windows registry. The differences are in the query methods and the communication medium involved.

Where does SDP fit into the Bluetooth stack?

SDP communicates directly with L2CAP, so it is independent of the protocol being used for any application level communication such as TCP/IP. SDP clients can use the records stored in the server database to identify the higher-level protocols required to communicate with a particular service, e.g. a printer service may be use PostScript over TCP over IP over RFCOMM over L2CAP.

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