RFC 3170 (rfc3170) - Page 1 of 28

IP Multicast Applications: Challenges and Solutions

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Network Working Group                                           B. Quinn
Request for Comments: 3170                                Celox Networks
Category: Informational                                      K. Almeroth
                                                        UC-Santa Barbara
                                                          September 2001


                       IP Multicast Applications:
                        Challenges and Solutions

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document describes the challenges involved with designing and
   implementing multicast applications.  It is an introductory guide for
   application developers that highlights the unique considerations of
   multicast applications as compared to unicast applications.

   To this end, the document presents a taxonomy of multicast
   application I/O models and examples of the services they can support.
   It then describes the service requirements of these multicast
   applications, and the recent and ongoing efforts to build protocol
   solutions to support these services.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
     1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
     1.2 Focus and Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   2. IP Multicast-enabled Network. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
     2.1 Essential Protocol Components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
       2.1.1 Expedient Joins and Leaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
       2.1.2 Send without a Join. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   3. IP Multicast Application Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
     3.1 One-to-Many Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
     3.2 Many-to-Many Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     3.3 Many-to-One Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
   4. Common Multicast Service Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
     4.1 Bandwidth Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13



Quinn, et al.                Informational
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