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Status:

EXPERIMENTAL

Authors:

M. Waehlisch
T. Schmidt
S. Venaas

Stream:

IRTF

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DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC7046

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Abstract

Group communication services exist in a large variety of flavors andtechnical implementations at different protocol layers. Multicastdata distribution is most efficiently performed on the lowestavailable layer, but a heterogeneous deployment status of multicasttechnologies throughout the Internet requires an adaptive servicebinding at runtime. Today, it is difficult to write an applicationthat runs everywhere and at the same time makes use of the mostefficient multicast service available in the network. Facingrobustness requirements, developers are frequently forced to use astable upper-layer protocol provided by the application itself. Thisdocument describes a common multicast API that is suitable fortransparent communication in underlay and overlay and that grantsaccess to the different flavors of multicast. It proposes anabstract naming scheme that uses multicast URIs, and it discussesmapping mechanisms between different namespaces and distributiontechnologies. Additionally, this document describes the applicationof this API for building gateways that interconnect current MulticastDomains throughout the Internet. It reports on an implementation ofthe programming Interface, including service middleware. Thisdocument is a product of the Scalable Adaptive Multicast (SAM)Research Group.

For the definition ofStatus,seeRFC 2026.

For the definition ofStream, seeRFC 8729.