Appologies in advance if this has been covered already.

I am wanting to develop an iOS mesh server app; connected via Wifi to mesh node.  Server App will serve HTTP/WEBDav for file upload/download.  The smart part is being able to "KNOW" the connected nodes so that the servers can communicate with each other when they are discovered so to speak.  As nodes connect and disconnect the iOS Server App can keep track. A client app can connect to their local node server and also have automatic access to data on other node servers.

I know that this information is available on the node web-interface but I would like my app to be able to access this live.

Is there some API that can be polled to retrieve this information, other can screen scraping the web-interface? 

Finally, is there a mechanism for an external device to register a service and add a port forwarding entry in the node?  This is so that my iOS app could tell if a newly connected node had an iOS device with the app running.