The following figure shows the workings of a responder's quick discovery state engine, also known as the enumeration state engine.

While in Quiescent state, responders only listen to broadcast frames and wait for a Discover frame to trigger an association with a mapper (only for topology discovery) or initiate enumeration session.

The Pausing state is critical to scalable discovery of the responders. During the Wait state, the responder waits for enumerators or the mapper to finalize their sessions via the Reset frame. Responders leave the Wait state for the Quiescent state when all enumerators have either timed out due to inactivity or have successfully sent the Reset command.

Message request/response pairs applicable to quick discovery are defined as follows.