Stateless IPv6 multicast using segment routing

Details

Supervisors

Bonaventure, Olivier

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Today's traditional multicast protocols are used by many applications that require the transmission of data to multiple destinations. As more and more applications evolve and are created over time, due to new emerging requirements, traditional multicast protocols suffer from several scalability limitations when they have to manage a large number of multicast groups. It appears that these limitations cannot be solved unless modifying explicitly the behaviour of the traditional multicast protocols. However, changing these standardised protocols can take years, and takes even more years to deploy the modified version. The use of new complementary protocols would be a more realistic way to overcome these limitations. This master thesis proposes a new Stateless multicast protocol to outreach these limitations. We leverage the flexibility and scalability properties of SRv6 to achieve multicast over an IPv6 network using segment-based routing. Our perspective is to keep the advantages of the current SRv6 architecture and to discuss how to extend it to support multicast forwarding in a more scalable and flexible way than traditional multicast architectures. After defining the proposed Stateless multicast protocol, we present the models we implemented to simulate the multicast process in networks that actually exist. Finally, an overview of the performances of the proposed Stateless multicast protocol inside the simulation model is given. It shows the current advantages and limitations of the proposed approach.