Large Scale Multicast Applications
charter-ietf-lsma-01

Note: Allyn Romanow <allyn@eng.sun.com> is also an Area Technical
Advisor.

This group focuses on the needs of applications that require real-time
or near real-time communications to support a large number of
simulation processes (virtual entities). These applications have been
analyzed by the U.S. Department of Defense to require IP multicast
support for 10K simultaneous groups, for upwards of 100K virtual
entities in a global sized WAN by the year 2000.

The concrete example application is the Distributed Interactive
Simulation work of the DIS Interoperability and Standards workshops and

standardized as IEEE 1278 - 1995.

The concrete example application is the Distributed Interactive
Simulation work of the DIS Interoperability and Standards workshops and
standardized as IEEE 1278 - 1995. Future simulation implementations
will use the High Level Architecture (HLA) work sponsored by the U.S.
Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and which is currently being
standardized by the newly formed Simulation Interoperability Standards
Organization (SISO).

The WG aims to provide documentation on how the IETF multicast
protocols, conference management protocols, transport protocols and
multicast routing protocols are expected to support the example
application. The result of this WG will be two Informational documents
that we hope will be used as input and advice by a number of IETF
working groups, among them IDMR, ION, MBONED, MMUSIC, and by working
groups being developed on Reliable Multicast Applications and QOS
Routing.

The document editors for the informational documents will be Steve
Seidensticker for "Scenarios" and Mark Pullen for "Limitations".

The Scenarios document will describe the environment in which
distributed simulation applications operate. It will provide realistic
example scenarios of small, medium and large simulation exercises. The
Limitations product will document the limitations of current IETF
products as they pertain to distributed applications. This document
will offer concise examples of how distributed applications demonstrate
these limitations and to the extent possible, offer potential solutions
to the identified limitations.

The documents will attempt to provide specific numbers for the demands
placed on protocol or infrastructure, and for the limits that protocols
impose on the applications.

The group will assess the need for new protocols to support the
requirements it identifies, and the Limitations document will report on
this assessment. One recommendation it expects to document is for
development of a virtual reality transfer protocol.