Light-weight Multicast Address Discovery Protocol
draft-williamson-mboned-madp-00

Abstract

Light-weight, multicast address discovery mechanisms that can be used by large scale client-server application deployments have been virtually non-existent in the past. This has resulted in many multicast client-server applications being deployed with "hard-coded" multicast addresses within the client workstations in order to provide "zero-configuration" operation of the application. Unfortunately, many of these hard-coded multicast addresses are often picked at random by the application developers resulting in multicast address collisions with other protocols/applications or conflicts with the multicast scoping plans of a network administrator. This document describes a "light-weight" multicast address discovery protocol that can be used by application clients to locate their nearest application server using well-known scope relative multicast addresses. Once located, the server can then communicate the multicast address(es) that have been configured on the server by the network administrator for use by the application. This permits applications be written to operate in a flexible "near-zero" configuration mode without having to use "hard-coded" addresses or rely on any other network service other than multicast and the existence of a nearby application server.

Authors

Beau Williamson

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