When looking at SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) the main problems seems to be distributing a services load across multiple hosts and then managing these hosts (taking hosts off line or adding new hosts)
When one service talks to another it should not need to know any host information (at the application level). Rather the SOA Environment should be able to route a service request to a specific host based on the hosts current load characteristics (so it must know all hots a service is running on and their relative load).
Are there any existing open protocols for service to report their existence and load to an SOA Environment.
After reading a lot the concept I was actually looking for was the Enterprise Service Bus ESP.
Though it does not explicitly define an explicit protocol it defines an architectural style that allows the solving of the problems I stated above.