All things related to multicast

[Hitoshi Asaeda <>]

> I don't know of anything...  it would be tough to measure...  in my
> mind, SSM is defined as edge routers speaking IGMPv3 and hosts speaking
> IGMPv3.  Sort of hard to measure unless one has a collection point in
> every LAN.

How about just collecting the number of multicast channels (via SAP
message?) and measuring the amount of the data whose destination
addresss are in an SSM range, and comparing with whole multicast data
in the network (i.e. Internet). Because (*,G) joins for the SSM
address range are just ignored by the first hop routers and only an
SSM-capable node can successfully join them.
And yes, we need to trace routing paths for them too.
Am I wrong?

> If anyone has any good ideas on how to measure this, I'm up for it.
> For example, collect stats from SSM sources on who actually joins,
> but this has its weaknesses too.

Knowing "who actually joins" is difficult, I know.
(Just fyi. We made some small work related to this issue.
Fethi Filali, Hitoshi Asaeda, and Walid Dabbous,
"Counting the Number of Members in Multicast Communication",
Proceedings of NGC 2002, pp.63-70, October 2002, Boston, USA.)

Thus it may be interested to collect "the number of senders using an
SSM addr range" and "the number of the multicast routing paths on as
many routers as possible".
--
Hitoshi Asaeda