Improving Internet multicast with routing labels

The IP-multicast architecture is extended with addressing information along multicast routing trees that permits more efficient and sophisticated multicast routing options and encourages communication and cooperation between IP and higher-layer protocols. The Addressable Internet Multicast (AIM) architecture is introduced that enables sources to restrict the delivery of packets to a subset of the receivers in a multicast group on a per-pocket basis, permits receivers to listen to subsets of sources on a subscription basis, provides nearest-host routing, and allows higher-layer protocols to place packets into application-defined logical streams, so that hosts may direct the multicast routing of packets based on application-defined contexts. In addition, the Reliable Multicast Architecture (RMA) is introduced to support end-to-end reliable multicasting using heterogeneous reliable multicast protocols and providing acknowledgment trees implicitly, thereby eliminating the ACK implosion problem and allowing NAK-avoidance algorithms to work within local groups