mDNS is a smart solution that allows multicast sessions (both of local and global scope) to be located and searched by end users from anywhere in the Internet. mDNS session capabilities come from the highly scalable and distributed design that embodies key design principles essential in any internet wide service infrastructure. At the heart of mDNS global architecture lies individual components within any particular network domain.

Within any single domain, mDNS components are:

• URS (URL Registration Server)
• MSD (Multicast Session Directory) server
• DNS (Domain Name Service) server

mDNS architecture design allows any multicast session to be assigned URL strings, very similar to popular web-domains. This allows end users to bookmark few popular sessions, just like they do popular webpages. Multicast session connection details may change with time as multicast addresses can not usually be assigned permanently. But mDNS takes this into account and the service automatically maps the fixed URLs to the most recent session details.

Are you interested to find out more on the research behind mDNS, here is the list of mDNS related research conference papers:

• An Overlay solution to IP-Multicast Address Collision Prevention
  Piyush Harsh and Richard Newman
  IASTED EuroIMSA 2008: March 17-19, 2008 Innsbruck, Austria.
  [Published] [Local PDF] [ACTA Online]
• mDNS - A Proposal for Hierarchical Multicast Session Directory Architecture
  Piyush Harsh and Richard Newman
  ICOMP'08: July 14-17, 2008 Las Vegas, USA.
  [Published] [Local PDF] [DBLP BibTeX Reference]
• Using GeoSpatial session tagging for smart Multicast session discovery
  Piyush Harsh and Richard Newman
  ACM SIGAPP SAC'09: March 8-12, 2009 Hawaii, USA.
  [Published] [Local PDF] [ACM Online]
• Efficient Distributed Search for Multicast Session Keywords
  Piyush Harsh and Richard Newman
  ICOMP'09: July 13-16, 2009 Las Vegas, USA.
  [To Appear] [Local PDF]

Another feature that mDNS supports is automatic geocoding. In future it will support location sensitive session searches that could open a whole slew of location based services previously unimagined.

mDNS software is under active development, on this page we will continually update the development snapshot for anyone who is interested in giving mDNS a shot.

Access latest mDNS installation: Click Here
mDNS Documentation and Installation Guide: coming soon
Check out the mDNS package JavaDocs: Click Here.