RFC 3048 (rfc3048) - Page 2 of 20

Reliable Multicast Transport Building Blocks for One-to-Many Bulk-Data Transfer

RFC 3048                  RMT Building Blocks               January 2001


Table of Contents

   1 Introduction ..................................................  2
   1.1 Protocol Families ...........................................  5
   2 Building Blocks Rationale .....................................  6
   2.1 Building Blocks Advantages ..................................  6
   2.2 Building Block Risks ........................................  7
   2.3 Building Block Requirements .................................  8
   3 Protocol Components ...........................................  8
   3.1 Sub-Components Definition ...................................  9
   4 Building Block Recommendations ................................ 12
   4.1 NACK-based Reliability ...................................... 13
   4.2 FEC coding .................................................. 13
   4.3 Congestion Control .......................................... 13
   4.4 Generic Router Support ...................................... 14
   4.5 Tree Configuration .......................................... 14
   4.6 Data Security ............................................... 15
   4.7 Common Headers .............................................. 15
   4.8 Protocol Cores .............................................. 15
   5 Security ...................................................... 15
   6 IANA Considerations ........................................... 15
   7 Conclusions ................................................... 16
   8 Acknowledgements .............................................. 16
   9 References .................................................... 16
   10 Authors' Addresses ........................................... 19
   11 Full Copyright Statement ..................................... 20

1.  Introduction

   RFC 2357 lays out the requirements for reliable multicast protocols
   that are to be considered for standardization by the IETF.  They
   include:

   o  Congestion Control.  The protocol must be safe to deploy in the
      widespread Internet.  Specifically, it must adhere to three
      mandates:  a) it must achieve good throughput (i.e., it must not
      consistently overload links with excess data or repair traffic),
      b) it must achieve good link utilization, and c) it must not
      starve competing flows.

   o  Scalability.  The protocol should be able to work under a variety
      of conditions that include multiple network topologies, link
      speeds, and the receiver set size.  It is more important to have a
      good understanding of how and when a protocol breaks than when it
      works.






Whetten, et al.              Informational