What Is Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM)?
To get the most out of your multicast, it's essential to take advantage of all available modes. Protocol-independent multicast is a family of protocols that can handle your multicasting needs across various internet topologies. These protocols can send information in both one-to-many and many-to-many modes, which means they're versatile enough for any situation you might encounter. All protocol-independent multicast protocols follow a similar format for control messages, making them easy to understand and implement, even if you're unfamiliar with other multicasting protocols. In addition, these messages are routable using routing information from different communication protocols—so protocol-independent multicast doesn't require its mechanism for topology discovery! The protocol assumes that all the receivers will be sparsely distributed in a multicast group in the environment. It is mainly for wide-area usage. The protocol supports the usage of shared trees, multicast distribution trees rooted at a specific node. It also helps using source-based trees, which have a separate multicast distribution tree for every source transmitting data to a multicast group. In sparse mode, it's essential to have a mechanism to discover the root node or rendezvous point. The protocol uses UDP as its transport layer protocol and relies on IGMP messages sent by hosts to join or leave a group and keep track of hosts' membership status in each group. A host sends an IGMP report message when it wants to enter or leave a group (sparse mode). Upon receiving this report message, routers update their forwarding tables appropriately for future packets destined for that group (light mode). Multicast, you say? I love that stuff. It's like the internet's answer to a viewing party: you invite your friends, and everyone watches the same thing simultaneously. It's great! But there are two types of multicast. Source-specific multicast is just like it sounds—it focuses on just one node, which acts as a root and builds trees based on that source. Bidirectional protocol independent multicast is similar to sparse mode—it uses a simple method of data transmission and does not encapsulate data. But unlike light mode, bidirectional does not use source-based trees at all—instead, each branch in a tree has its designated router with no branches leading back to the root. It makes it great for broadcasting large amounts of information across large sets of sources because it doesn't require every single node in the network to be able to handle all that data.
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