The source-multicast: A sender-initiated multicast member management mechanism in SRv6 networks

摘要

The multicast is an efficient approach for one-to-many communications. However, multicast has not been widely deployed due to the lack of the perceptibility and operability to the receivers as well as the excessive status in the routers. In the typical multicast, the sender cannot operate the members in the group, which makes the multicast unable to meet the newly emerging demand, such as the sender-initiating, the reliability, and the security. Thus we put forward the source-multicast as a novel member management mechanism in SRv6 (Segment Routing IPv6) networks. We define some new SRv6 segments and the corresponding processes in different network entities. We present the Packet-Control Mode to provide the operability to the sender. We leverage the Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) as the transmission underlay to optimize the transmission. The source-multicast enhances the multiple-destinations ability to the IP, which allows the efficient multicast-like transmission pattern as well as the fine-grained member management. Some experiments are conducted in order to measure the processing latency in source-multicast and to find out the efficient conditions of source-multicast. The results indicate that the source-multicast is suitable for the scenarios having a large number of sessions, the bounded number of receivers, as well as the small scale multicast tree.