Analysis and engineering of the infrastructure required to support multicast traffic at an Internet Exchange Point – Diplomarbeit – Honours Thesis – Gerd Besch – Equinix 2001
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Equinix for giving me the opportunity to write my
thesis in a great company in the Golden State California.
I am also very grateful to my colleagues in R&D Ted Hardie, Lane
Patterson, Diarmuid Flynn and last but not least Jay Adelson for their help
and support during the last nine month.
Thanks to Min Zhu and Nitin Jain from Foundry Networks for implementing
and debugging the PIM-snooping code and to Marshall Eubanks from
Multicast Technologies and Kevin C. Almeroth from UCSB for their advice.
Special thanks to my colleague Ian Cooper for his valuable advice on the
question “How to write a flawless thesis?”. The answer is: 42.
Abstract
This thesis discusses using “PIM-snooping” as a solution for handling
multicast traffic at a Multicast Internet Exchange Point (MIX) on a shared
Gigabit-Ethernet switch fabric. Existing MIXs essentially treat multicast
traffic as broadcast traffic. Switch ports are flooded due to the lack of
information on how to efficiently replicate multicast traffic only onto ports
where receivers for specific multicast groups exist.
Protocol Independent Multicast Join/Prune messages can be exploited to
provide necessary multicast containment.