> Multicast is seductive to designers who ignore the realities of > propagation and channel coding issues, because they think it works one > way, but the reality is quite different.
Hold on. Mulsticast is used for two distinct purposes: for broadcast-style applications (streaming), and for discovery (ARP, ND, mDNS, and of course the Hello beaconing of routing protocols). For broadcast-style applications, multicast can be replaced with multiple unicast streams, as Netflix shows, although this is best done at the routers rather than at the senders, since this allows building a single distribution tree without the need for application-layer proxies ("CDNs"). For discovery, multicast is unavoidable -- there's simply no way you're going to send a unicast to a node that you haven't discovered yet. -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ Babel-users mailing list Babel-users@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/babel-users