Thursday, May 3, 2012

SSM needs IGMPv3

Source-specific multicast (SSM) is a method 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. By so limiting the source, SSM reduces demands on the network and improves security.
SSM requires that the receiver specify the source address and explicitly excludes the use of the (*,G) join for all multicast groups in RFC 3376, which is possible only in IPv4's IGMPv3 and IPv6's MLDv2.
Source-specific multicast is best understood in contrast to any-source multicast (ASM). In the ASM service model a receiver expresses interest in traffic to a multicast address. The multicast network must
  1. discover all multicast sources sending to that address, and
  2. route data from all sources to all interested receivers.
This behavior is particularly well suited to groupware applications where
  1. all participants in the group want to be aware of all other participants, and
  2. the list of participants is not known in advance.
The source discovery burden on the network can become significant when the number of sources is large.
In the SSM service model, in addition to the receiver expressing interest in traffic to a multicast address, the receiver expresses interest in receiving traffic from only one specific source sending to that multicast address. This relieves the network of discovering many multicast sources and reduces the amount of multicast routing information that the network must maintain.
SSM requires support in last-hop routers and in the receiver's operating system. SSM support is not required in other network components, including routers and even the sending host. Interest in multicast traffic from a specific source is conveyed from hosts to routers using IGMPv3 as specified in RFC 4607.
SSM destination addresses must be in the ranges 232.0.0.0/8 for IPv4 or FF3x::/96 for IPv6.


Source Specific Multicast (SSM) requires Internet Group Management Protocol Version 3 (IGMPv3) 

PIM-SSM is the routing protocol that supports the implementation of SSM and is derived from PIM sparse mode (PIM-SM). IGMP is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards track protocol used for hosts to signal multicast group membership to routers. Version 3 of this protocol supports source filtering, which is required for SSM.

Ref: 
Source-specific multicast 
Source Specific Multicast with IGMPv3, IGMP v3lite, and URD 
Using IGMPv3 For Source-Specific Multicast 

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