Protocol Independent Multicast

Protocol Independent Multicast

Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) is a family of multicast routing protocols for Internet Protocol (IP) networks that provide one-to-many and many-to-many distribution of data over a LAN, WAN or the Internet. It is termed protocol-independent because PIM does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other traditional routing protocols such as the Routing Information Protocol, Open Shortest Path First, Border Gateway Protocol and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol.

There are four variants of PIM:

  • PIM Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) explicitly builds unidirectional shared trees rooted at a rendezvous point (RP) per group, and optionally creates shortest-path trees per source. PIM-SM generally scales fairly well for wide-area usage. See the PIM Internet Standard RFC 4601.
  • PIM Dense Mode (PIM-DM) uses dense multicast routing. It implicitly builds shortest-path trees by flooding multicast traffic domain wide, and then pruning back branches of the tree where no receivers are present. PIM-DM is straightforward to implement but generally has poor scaling properties. The first multicast routing protocol, DVMRP used dense-mode multicast routing. See the PIM Internet Standard RFC 3973.
  • Bidirectional PIM explicitly builds shared bi-directional trees. It never builds a shortest path tree, so may have longer end-to-end delays than PIM-SM, but scales well because it needs no source-specific state. See Bidirectional PIM Internet Standard RFC 5015.
  • PIM source-specific multicast (PIM-SSM) builds trees that are rooted in just one source, offering a more secure and scalable model for a limited amount of applications (mostly broadcasting of content). In SSM, an IP datagram is transmitted by a source S to an SSM destination address G, and receivers can receive this datagram by subscribing to channel (S,G). See informational RFC 3569.

Of the four, PIM-SM has the widest deployment. PIM-SM is commonly used in IPTV systems for routing multicast streams between VLANs, Subnets or local area networks.

Read more about Protocol Independent Multicast:  Sparse Mode, Dense Mode

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