All things related to multicast

[Leonard Giuliano <>]

Hitoshi,

I think you hit the nail on the head here regarding SAP.  I think what you 
see here in mcast is similiar to the evolution of unicast content.  In the 
beginning, there was no tool to find and organize web pages.  Yahoo 
started out as a few students posting a list of their favorite web pages.  
This list got too long and unwieldy and gradually evolved a search engine.  
Today, with portals and tools like Google, we have very efficient ways to 
discover unicast content.

I think mcast will eventually have to follow this model.  While SAP is a 
nice and simple tool to discover content, it simply won't scale to the day 
when millions of mcast streams are available (yes, this is a very 
optimistic vision given where we are today, but I still think it's 
possible).  We couldn't imagine a web page today that carried a list of 
all the unicast content available.

In any event, if we can rely on Google to find unicast content, I see no 
reason why we couldn't rely on it to find mcast content.


-Lenny

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008, Hitoshi Asaeda wrote:

-) Hi Marshall,
-) 
-) Unfortunately, SAP is not suitable for session announcement *over a
-) large interdomain network* according to its protocol design. It is
-) based on soft-state approach. As DVMRP was diminished, its mission
-) would be probably when the native multicast networks are largely
-) enabled over the Internet.
-) 
-) I'll submit an individual I-D to mboned next week, where the issues
-) and limitations of SAP are clarified and the requirements for the
-) session announcement schema over the Internet are descrived.
-) 
-) In addition, as Stig pointed out, we have been working for a new
-) session announcement system called Channel Reflector. It does not
-) inherit SAP-like soft-state approach but is conformed with distributed
-) agents. The alpha version will be released at the end of this August.
-) I hope it will fulfill the demand of session announcement.
-) 
-) Regards,
-) --
-) Hitoshi Asaeda
-)