Thomas, >1) Do people think that the existance of multicast within a site > (e.g., home, enterprise, etc.) can be assumed? > > Note: I'm assuming link-local multicast will always work, the > question is whether wider scope (beyond neighboring routers) > multicast is available.
As much as I would like to see it otherwise, except for link (and maybe subnet) scoped multicast, I don't think we can assume multicast across a wider scope. I suspect it will be more the exception than the norm. >2) If the answer is "can't assume multicast is present", what should > be done about it. e.g., > > - What are the barriers that are preventing multicast from being an > assumed part of the infrastructure? What is needed to remove > those barriers? Don't we have a whole working group dealing with this (e.g., mboned)? It's a complicated mixture of routing protocol scaling, lack of agreement of inter-domain routing protocols, lack of interoperability between vendors of multicast routing protocols, few compelling applications that need multicast that can't be meet with unicast, etc. There are a few places where it is used (i.e., financial industry), but as far as I can tell it's not widely adopted much beyond that. > - Which infrastructure protocols does IPv6 rely on that assume the > existance of multicast, and how are they limited if multicast is > not available? Off the top of my head, DHCPv6 and Router Renumbering. Bob -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
