scope:

The goal of Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) is to provide guidance to applications that have to select one or several hosts from a set of candidates capable of providing a desired resource. ALTO is realized by a client-server protocol. Before an ALTO client can ask for guidance, it needs to discover one or more ALTO servers.

This document specifies a procedure for resource-consumer-initiated ALTO server discovery, which can be used if the ALTO client is embedded in the resource consumer.