Revisiting IP multicast

This paper revisits a much explored topic in networking - the search for a simple yet fully-general multicast design. The many years of research into multicast routing have led to a generally pessimistic view that the complexity of multicast routing-and inter-domain multicast routing in particular - can only be overcome by restricting the service model (as in single-source) multicast. This paper proposes a new approach to implementing IP multicast that we hope leads to a reevaluation of this commonly held view.