A Dynamic Bootstrap Mechanism for Rendezvous - basedMulticast

Current multicast routing protocols can be classiied into three types according to how the multicast tree is established: broadcast and prune (e. protocols associate with each logical multicast group address, a physical unicast address, referred to as thècore' or`rendezvous point' (RP). Members rst join a multicast tree rooted at this rendezvous point in order to receive data packets sent to the group. Rendezvous mechanisms are well suited to large wide-area networks because they distribute group-speciic data and membership information only to those routers that are on the multicast distribution tree. However, rendezvous protocols require a bootstrap mechanism to map each logical multicast address to its current physical rendezvous-point address. The bootstrap mechanism must adapt to network and router failures but should minimize unnecessary changes in the group-to-RP mapping. In addition, the bootstrap mechanism should be transparent to the hosts. This paper describes and analyzes the bootstrap mechanism developed for PIM-SM. The mechanism employs an algorithmic mapping of multicast group to rendezvous point address, based on a set of available RPs distributed throughout a multicast domain. The primary evaluation measures are convergence time, message distribution overhead, balanced assignment of groups to RPs, and host impact. The mechanism as a whole, and the design lessons in particular, are applicable to other rendezvous-based multicast routing protocols as well.