Multicast Forwarding Equivalence Class [MFEC]
draft-guo-mboned-mfec-framework-01

Abstract

At present, the multimedia services such as IPTV are gaining importance. Multicast technologies play an inevitable role in these multimedia services. The main factors affecting the multicast technologies are the convergence speed and the capacity of the multicast routing table. One of the easiest and the most commonly practiced methods in nowadays multicast deployment is to push the data to the end router by static configurations (igmp static group). This will reduce the delay in channel switching. The data flow of multiple channels from one or several servers are transmitted along the distribution tree. The distribution tree for multiple channels may be composed of only one same distribution tree. A router, however, maintains separate protocol-status and provides separate protocol-packets content for each channel. This prolongs the route convergence, increases the status-space and reduces the exchange rate of protocol-packets. This document proposes a solution to speed up the route convergence, reduce the states in the multicast forwarding table and increase the exchange rate of packets. This can be achieved by using the same state for the data flows that passes the same path in the distribution tree. This same state is called Multicast Forwarding Equivalent Class (MFEC). In other words, MFEC is a group of multicast packets that are forwarded over the same path with the same traffic handling treatment. This solution extends various multicast protocols such as PIM- SSM, PIM-SM, Bidir-PIM, PIM-DM and DVMRP, and perfects application of multicast.

Authors

Feng Guo

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