I-D ACTION:draft-ooms-xcast-basic-spec-08.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: Explicit Multicast (Xcast) Basic Specification
	Author(s)	: R. Boivie, et al.
	Filename	: draft-ooms-xcast-basic-spec-08.txt
	Pages		: 33
	Date		: 2005-7-22

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 [1075, 2201, 2236, DEER,
   DEE2, FARI, HOLB, MBONE, PERL].

   However, while traditional multicast schemes are scalable 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 - named Explicit
   Multi-unicast (Xcast) - that complements the existing schemes.
   Whereas the existing schemes can support a limited number of very
   large multicast sessions, Xcast can support a very large number of
   small multicast sessions.  This is achieved by explicitly encoding
   the list of destinations in the data packets, instead of using a
   multicast address.

   The co-operation of Xcast - a data plane mechanism - with existing
   control planes is described and scenarios for gradual deployment are
   investigated.  Encodings for both IPv4 and IPv6 are proposed.

   This document discusses concepts and optional ideas in several areas
   and does not provide a complete technical specification at this
   point.  However, significant experience  has been obtained in
   implementation, in interoperability testing and in operational
   experiments. The details of these experiments will be discussed in a
   forthcoming informational RFC [BCP-2004].

   This draft combines with previous drafts: [BOIV], [IMAI], [OOMS].

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