Implementation of Source Specific Multicast (SSM) in a test bed over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and multicast are two technologies which are expected to gain huge significance in the future. Multicasting is a technique which allows a single transmission to be sent to multiple hosts anywhere on the Internet providing efficient delivery for streaming audio and video content and IPv6 adds a unique and much larger IP address space, provides improved security, efficient routing, support for mobile and an increased number of multicast addresses. Source specific multicast (SSM) is a technique of delivering multicast packets in which the only packets that are delivered to a receiver are those originating from a specific source address requested by the receiver. This paper gives an approach of how to construct a source specific multicast test bed over Internet Protocol version 6 and various issues related to the configuration and deployment would be dealt with, in addition to the experience that we had in its implementation and testing. It would involve the fundamentals of source specific multicast, the preparation of a FreeBSD machine as a multicast router, the installation of the PIM-SM daemon (pim6sd) on FreeBSD, the configuration of the network, streaming video over the SSM IPv6 network and finally discussing some issues in deploying the network.