In the environment where a lot of control equipments are connected discretely, to offer those equipments additional flexibility, the network is required to be high speed, high reliability, and real-time responsibility. IEEE 1394 is preferable as the underlying data transport technology to meet such requirements. IEEE 1394 is an interface that can support Plug Play between the control equipments without a host device, and guarantee real-time stream and data transmission. Hence, it is suitable for a backbone network of a control network. However, in the current IEEE 1394 specification, there are some issues: band shortage when a lot of devices are connected and the reliability decrease in the communication when the network topology changes. By using the new technology, the bus bridge for IEEE 1394, some of the issues can be handled. Nevertheless, some issues still remain even if the bus bridge technology is applied. In this paper, to address these remaining and new issues, the message-type service discovery method is proposed. The message-type service discovery can achieve the efficiency of forwarding communication by transmitting service information of the equipment as a set of messages. The proposed method enables IEEE 1394 with the bus bridge to transmit service information of the equipments at high speed. Then, the time required for the service discovery of the proposed method is measured and the basic characteristics of the proposed method are discussed.
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