MBONE Working Group

The MBONE working group discussed traffic on the Multicast Backbone.

Mbone as it existed before the advance of PIM as a more effective and more scalable way to organise the Multicast-routing table there was a need to coordinate on a pan-european level the socalled DVRP-Tunnel setup. It was a bilateral configuration (mostly on workstations or servers) that were able to control and route multicast packets. That was until about 1997. PIM showed great advantages and it was also natively integrated into routers where IP packets normally get processed most efficiently.

Activities

The Routing-WG now deals with exactly those issues that effect the operation and security of the major backbone providers and their routers. Multicast - or Mbone (which actually means the experimental part of Multicast routing) plays just a minor part in today's routing issues.

It was agreed that The Mbone-WG remained a permanent item on the Routing-WG agenda for a while, with the proviso that the Working Group might be revived should the community so desire.