A protocol employed by a workstation on a local area network (LAN) to find its Internet Protocol (IP) address. BOOTP originally was intended to allow a diskless client machine to discover its own IP address, the address of a server host computer, and the name of a file to be loaded into memory and executed. First described in IETF RFC 951 (1985), BOOTP runs on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is based on BOOTP, but is far more complex. See also client, DHCP, host, IETF, IP, IP address, LAN, protocol, server, UDP, and workstation,