RFC 3810 (rfc3810) - Page 2 of 62

Multicast Listener Discovery Version 2 (MLDv2) for IPv6

RFC 3810                     MLDv2 for IPv6                    June 2004


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Protocol Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  The Service Interface for Requesting IP Multicast Reception .   9
   4.  Multicast Listening State Maintained by Nodes . . . . . . . .  11
   5.  Message Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
   6.  Protocol Description for Multicast Address Listeners. . . . .  27
   7.  Protocol Description for Multicast Routers. . . . . . . . . .  34
   8.  Interoperation with MLDv1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  48
   9.  List of Timers, Counters, and their Default Values. . . . . .  51
   10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  55
   11. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  56
   12. References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  56
   13. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  57
   Appendix A. Design Rationale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  58
   Appendix B. Summary of Changes from MLDv1 . . . . . . . . . . . .  59
   Editors' Contact Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  61
   Authors' Addresses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  61
   Full Copyright Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  62

1.  Introduction

   The Multicast Listener Discovery Protocol (MLD) is used by IPv6
   routers to discover the presence of multicast listeners (i.e., nodes
   that wish to receive multicast packets) on their directly attached
   links, and to discover specifically which multicast addresses are of
   interest to those neighboring nodes.  Note that a multicast router
   may itself be a listener of one or more multicast addresses; in this
   case it performs both the "multicast router part" and the "multicast
   address listener part" of the protocol, to collect the multicast
   listener information needed by its multicast routing protocol on the
   one hand, and to inform itself and other neighboring multicast
   routers of its listening state on the other hand.

   This document specifies Version 2 of MLD.  The previous version of
   MLD is specified in [RFC 2710].  In this document we will refer to it
   as MLDv1.  MLDv2 is a translation of the IGMPv3 protocol [RFC 3376]
   for IPv6 semantics.

   The MLDv2 protocol, when compared to MLDv1, adds support for "source
   filtering", i.e., the ability for a node to report interest in
   listening to packets *only* from specific source addresses, as
   required to support Source-Specific Multicast [RFC 3569], or from *all
   but* specific source addresses, sent to a particular multicast
   address.  MLDv2 is designed to be interoperable with MLDv1.





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