Abstract

Multicast has become increasingly important with the emergence of network-based applications such as IP telephony and video conferencing. The Internet community has done a significant amount of work on IP multicast over the last decade [1-10] and as a result, there are a number of multicast applications that are used today on the Mbone, the multicast-capable virtual network that is layered on top of (portions of) the Internet [10]. However, while today's multicast schemes are scaleable in the sense that they can support very large multicast groups, there are scalability issues when a network needs to support a very large number of distinct multicast groups. This document describes a new scheme for multicast that complements the existing schemes. Whereas the existing schemes can support a limited number of very large multicast groups, the scheme described here can support a very large number of small multicast groups.

Authors

Richard Boivie (rhboivie@us.ibm.com)
Nancy Feldman (nkf@us.ibm.com)

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)