Work Proposal

[Cheng-Yin Lee <leecy@nortelnetworks.com>]

Here's an outline of what the group could do (for discussion) :

The primary goal of the group is to develop specifications that will
ease the scaling (in the longer term) of
current multicast routing protocols targeted for these type of
applications:
* Internet wide information distribution (eg 'webcast', content
subscription/distribution)
* Internet wide interactive information exchange (eg
conferencing/discussion, games).

The approach taken will allow the root (source or core) of the multicast
distribution tree to allocate logical  addresses that can be used to
address multicast groups.
Since address management is local to the root, it will not require
Internet wide coordination and will also
facilitate applications to use the address space in a creative and
application specific manner (eg content
filtering/naming, layered data) where applicable.

The scope of work is as follows:

* extend the current multicast API to use this new addressing
- the group multicast address will consist of both the root (source or
core) of the multicast tree and a
multicast address.

* extend the current multicast data forwarding to forward based on
<root, multicast address>.
The address encoding should allow :
- routers which do not understand this new addressing to forward packets
non natively (unicast)
- current hardware to forward packet with this new addressing when the
root is the source of the multicast  group in the initial implementation
and deployment,
- for hardware to be upgraded to forward packet with the core as root.

* migration issues related to the above

Reference:
* "Multicast Requirements for the Definition of New IP Multicast
Services"
  Christophe Diot, Bryan Lyles, Sprint ATL
  Brian Neil Levine, Consultant, Sprint ATL
  Ramanan Shanmugam, Amir Tabdili, Hassan Kassem, Sprintlink


cheers,
cyl