patb@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (Pat Blankenship) (06/04/90)
Hi Darren. I am a member of the DCA Protocol Standards Technical Panel, and we have been looking into the question you have raised. The military, especially tactical forces, have a distinct need for multicasting which can make use of existing broadcast (radio-based) non-OSI subnets. We too have found it very difficult to construct a scenario for multi- casting in a CO-environment. It is a lot easier in the CL environment. ISO explored this whole topic, both CO and CL, in a project called Multi-Peer Data Transmission (MPDT), which would have caused major changes in the reference model and virtually all protocols. The project was cancelled due to lack of support in late 1989. We are hoping to do further study and perhaps prototyping of a multicast service in a CL environment in the next year or so. FYI, there are a couple of RFCs describing multicasting in the Internet. The latest one is RFC 1054, by Steve Deering. Let me know if anyone responds to you with any bright ideas. Pat Blankenship MITRE Corporation Eatontown, NJ
postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU (06/05/90)
Hi. Actually, the latest RFC on IP Multicast is RFC-1112. --jon.