AUTOMATED DISCOVERY AND INSTALLATION OF NETWORK-ATTACHED PERIPHERAL DEVICES
Lawrence Alan Mandel · Scholarship@Western (Western University) · 2011
ABSTRACT Networks today are pervasive and numerous. They are accessed using a variety of client devices such as traditional laptop and desktop computers, phones, tablets, music players, and video game consoles. Networks may contain many categories of services, of which an increasingly common one is the network attached peripheral device. Network attached peripheral devices, such as printers, fax machines, and video projectors, are available to client devices that have installed and configured the associated device driver software. Practically, this means that network attached peripheral devices are hidden from or unavailable to client devices until a user performs the manual discovery of the network attached peripheral device and the installation of the requisite device driver software. This paper presents a system architecture that allows for the automatic discovery and installation of network attached peripheral devices with no user intervention.