Technical Summary
The Selectively Reliable Multicast Protocol (SRMP) is a congestion-
aware transport protocol over UDP, intended to deliver a mix
of reliable and best-effort messages in an any-to-any
multicast environment, where the best-
effort traffic occurs in significantly greater volume than the
reliable traffic and therefore can be used to carry sequence
numbers of reliable messages for loss detection. SRMP is intended
for use in a distributed simulation application environment, where
only the latest value of reliable transmission for any particular
data identifier requires delivery.
Like all multicast transport protocols with reliability, the IETF
publishes SRMP as an Experimental specification first, in order
to assess the impact of the RFC, and determine after a year or
two whether the congestion avoidance and control are effective,
prior to considering standardization.
Working Group Summary
This protocol was developed by individual contributors to IETF,
but it received some discussion and review by the Reliable Multicast
Working Group, which determined that its any-to-any multicast
basis was outside the RMT charter, but that the basic approach
was simple and did not raise objections.
The sponsoring AD reviewed comparable work from ISO JTC-1 SC-6
and believes this work is well-distinguished because of its mixed reliability
service offering.
Protocol Quality
The protocol has been implemented and tested by several
groups, and there is a publicly available simulation for it as well.
A careful review against the RFC 2357 requirements was performed
by the sponsoring Area Director, Allison Mankin.