Service discovery mechanisms provide a means for devices to announce their presence and seek information about the existence of other services on the network. Many of these mechanisms are DNS-based.

The exact use of such protocols as DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), Multi-cast DNS (mDNS) and DNS Dynamic Updates is defined in RFC's referenced by DICOM. This section standardizes the name to be used in DNS SRV records for such purposes, and the DNS TXT records that encode accompanying parameters.

Security issues associated with self-discovery are out of scope. See Section F.1.1.4 for the informative discussion on DNS Security issues.