Patent ID: 8559350

Claim:
An information element for wirelessly conveying information to a first device about a service provided by a second device, prior to establishing a connection between the first device and the second device that is suitable for providing the service, the information element comprising: at least one first portion comprising information related to the service provided by the second device; and at least one second portion comprising information representing a first service discovery protocol used by the first device for discovering the service, the information representing the first service discovery protocol comprising a format identifier to allow the first device to identify the first service discovery protocol to use to discover the service, wherein the format identifier is compressed using a hash function and identifies an information element format associated with the first service discovery protocol, wherein the first service discovery protocol is the Web Services Discovery protocol, wherein the hashed format identifier is used by the first device to identify the first service discovery protocol as the Web Services Discovery protocol, and wherein, based on the identification of the Web Services Discovery protocol, the first device delivers information from the information element to a Web Services Discovery module.