Printer discovery and ranking
AssigneeHewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP
InventorsSwetha Nandyalam Suresh, Mahesh Venkateshwaran, Srivaths Janakiraman Mohan
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Printers are ranked and the printer ranks are provided to a user during printer discovery. A wireless configuration at an access point may include ranks for the printers along with access policies for the printers. The access policies are used to provide a list of available printers to a user. The ranks of the available printers are also provided to the user. A list of available printers may be displayed to the user in descending order of the printer ranks.
Claims17
A method, implemented by an access point, the method comprising:
- obtaining attributes of a printer, the access point and the printer being in a first network, wherein the attributes of the printer comprise a supply level of the printer;
- sending the attributes of the printer to a network management server, the network management server being in a second network, the second network being different than the first network;
- receiving a wireless configuration from the network management server, the wireless configuration comprising an access policy for the printer and a rank of the printer, the access policy for the printer generated based on a management configuration of the first network, the rank of the printer generated based on the attributes of the printer;
- and
- programming the access point with the wireless configuration.
A method, implemented by a network management server, the method comprising:
- receiving attributes of printers from access points, the access points and the printers being in a first network, the network management server being in a second network, the second network being different than the first network, wherein the attributes of the printers comprise supply levels of the printers;
- generating a wireless configuration comprising access policies for the printers and ranks of the printers by:
- generating the ranks of the printers based on the attributes of the printers, wherein generating the ranks of the printers comprises:
- ranking the printers in descending order of weighted sums of the supply levels;
- and
- generating the access policies for the printers based on a management configuration of the first network;
- and
- sending the wireless configuration to the access points.
A system comprising:
- a printer in a first network;
- an access point in the first network, the access point configured to obtain attributes of the printer via a network printing protocol;
- and
- a network management server in a second network, the second network being different than the first network, the network management server configured to:
- receive the attributes of the printer from the access point, wherein the attributes of the printer comprise a supply level of the printer;
- generate a rank of the printer by calculating a weighted sum of the attributes of the printer;
- generate an access policy for the printer based on a management configuration of the first network;
- and
- send a wireless configuration to the access point, the wireless configuration comprising the access policy for the printer and the rank of the printer,
- wherein the access point is further configured to filter multicast requests from the printer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.