Abstract
This paper describes Root Administered Multicast Addressing (RAMA), a protocol for wide-area IP multicast that scales to a large number of simultaneous groups with topologically distant members. RAMA solves the wide-area “rendezvous” problem by making the root of the distribution tree explicit in the multicast group identifier. This is done by extending the 4-byte IPv4 multicast group address format to an 8-byte address format, (R, G), where R is the unicast address of the root of the multicast distribution tree and G is a group identifier, unique with respect to R and administered by it. Data distribution occurs via a single shared bi-directional tree, allowing scalable operation for multiple senders. RAMA generalizes two recent protocols, Simple Multicast [18] and EXPRESS Multicast [10], into a common protocol that has the desirable features of both.
RAMA has several advantages over existing designs for wide-area IP multicast: (i) it is a single protocol that works both within a domain and across domains, (ii) it provides efficient support for multiple-sender as well as single-sender applications, (iii) since group identifiers are allocated and administered locally with respect to the root, there is no need for globally coordinated Internet-wide multicast address allocation. Hence, RAMA does not require a companion heavy-weight multicast address allocation infrastructure. The extended address format also provides a larger number of multicast addresses, mitigating the address availability problem.
In this paper, we motivate and describe the RAMA protocol architecture and the engineering issues in developing and deploying it. Extended addressing in RAMA requires changes to end hosts, and we outline the design and implementation of RAMA using IP options for a BSD-based end host operating system. Unfortunately, IP options are not handled efficiently by today’s routers which forward such packets in a slow path, typically in software. To address this issue, we also discuss variants of RAMA that do not require the extended address format.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ballardie, T., Francis, P., Crowcroft, J.: Core Based Trees (CBT): An Architecture for Scalable Inter-Domain Multicast Routing. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM 1993, San Francisco, CA, pp. 85–95. ACM, New York (1993)
Dalal, Y., Metcalfe, R.: Reverse pathforw arding of broadcast packets. Communications of the ACM (December 1978)
Deering, S., Estrin, D., Farinacci, D., Jacobson, V.: An Architecture for Wide-Area Multicast Routing. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM 1994, University College London, London, U.K., ACM, New York (1994)
Deering, S., Estrin, D., Farinacci, D., Jacobson, V., Helmy, A., Meyer, D., Wei, L.: Protocol Independent Multicast version 2 Dense Mode Specification (August 1997) Internet Draft
Deering, S., Hinden, R.: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification, RFC-2460 (December 1998)
Deering, S.E.: Multicast Routing in a Datagram Internetwork. PhD thesis, Stanford University (December 1991)
Farinacci, D., Rekhter, Y., Lothberg, P., Kilmer, H., Hall, J.: Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) (June 1998) Internet Draft
Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., McCanne, S., Liu, C.-G., Zhang, L.: A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-weight Sessions and Application Level Framing. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM 1995, Boston, MA, ACM, New York (1995)
Handley, M., Jacobson, V.: sdr — A Multicast Session Directory. University College London
Holbrook, H., Cheriton, D.: IP Multicast Channels: EXPRESS Support for Large-scale Single-source Applications. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM 1999, Cambridge, MA, ACM, New York (1999)
Kadansky, M., Chiu, D., Wesley, J., Provino, J.: Tree-based Reliable Multicast (TRAM) (September 1999) Internet Draft
Kumar, S., Radoslavav, P., Thaler, D., Alaettinoglu, C., Estrin, D., Handley, M.: The MASC/BGMP Architecture for Inter-domain Multicast Routing. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM 1998, Vancouver, Canada, ACM, New York (1998)
Li, D., Cheriton, D.: OTERS (On-Tree Efficient Recovery using Subcasting): A Reliable Multicast Protocol. In: Proceedings of 6th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP 1998) (October 1998)
Lo, J., Taniguchi, K.I.: Network Address (and Port) Translation (June 1998) Internet Draft expires 6/99
Lougheed, K., Rekhter, Y.: A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Cisco Systems and T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp, RFC-1105 (June 1989)
Meyer, D.: Glop Bit Usage. Cisco Systems, draft-ietf-mboned-glop-bits-00.txt (1999)
Ohta, M., Crowcroft, J.: Static Multicast (June 1999) Internet Draft
Perlman, R., Crowcroft, J., Ballardie, T., Lee, C.-Y.: A Design for Simple Low Overhead Multicast (December 1998) Internet Draft (work in progress)
Schulzrinne, H., Casner, S., Frederick, R., Jacobson, V.: RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications. Internet Engineering Task Force, Audio-Video Transport Working Group, RFC-1889 (January 1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Perlman, R., Raman, S. (1999). Techniques for Making IP Multicast Simple and Scalable. In: Rizzo, L., Fdida, S. (eds) Networked Group Communication. NGC 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1736. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-46703-8_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-46703-8_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66782-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46703-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive