Subject: mboned: A simplistic automatic tunneling solution for Multicast

From: Venketesan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 23:50:42 -0600

Hi all,
I wish to present the technical simplicity of the solution for the
serious administrative tunnneling issue of IP multicast. 

"Use the protocol number field for interception of multicast packets
instead of the class of the destination address, carry the group address
in a separate header on top of the IPv4 header, always have unicast IPv4
destination address"

Our protocol is called implicit multicast. 
www.ece.iit.edu/~leung/papers/imcast.pdf

Please read through a brief the following technical points about the
IMcast protocols, we substantiate these in our paper available at the
above link.
1. It can operate transperently through legacy routers, MBONE is no more
required. 
2. The Source rooted tree constructed is the best possible after stiner
trees, none of the present protocols including Source specific-IP
multicast, REUNITE or HBH have this property. 
3. The control plane algorithm in IMcast can be adopted in PIM-SM to
make it transperent to legacy routers. Thus can be used as an automatioc
tunneling soltion between IP multicast islands. 
4. The multicast address space is now independent of unicast. Thus class
D only addressing is no more mandatory. But if host stack modifications
are to be avoided Class D can be retained. 
5. When applied in a SSM fashion it builds shortest path trees from
sender to receivers, thus takes care of asymetric routes.

I would be very encouraged if you could provide feedback/discussion on
the approach. Looking forward to your response. Thank you very much for
your time.

regards,
Venkat

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