A dynamic SSM source discovery protocol

Steven Deering´s multicast communication model offers a powerful and flexible service for group communicating processes. Sending a multidestination datagram with only one local source operation, implicit source discovery for an open group, and logical binding. All theses features without limits on group size and dynamics. This proposition, later called any source multicast (ASM) has not been deployed at large scale on Internet partially because of the unscalability of multicast routing protocols. A new service model but potentially scalable to the whole Internet has been proposed: source specific multicast (SSM). It is less powerful because it needs an explicit source discovery mechanism for receivers. In this paper, we propose and evaluate such a session layer mechanism. This protocol offers the source discovery service missing from source specific multicast routing. We have implemented this protocol, which permits us to evaluate its feasibility and scalability.