Abstract: Techniques are described for reducing unnecessary upstream traffic toward a rendezvous point (RP) of a network using Protocol Independent Multicast Bidirectional Mode. The RP may be either a router configured with the rendezvous point address (RPA) on its loopback interface, or one of several routers connected to an RP link with the RPA. The techniques include determining whether the RP needs to receive multicast traffic for a multicast group and, when the RP does not need to receive the multicast traffic, sending RP-prune control messages for the multicast group to downstream routers on non-RP links. Upon receiving an RP-prune control message, a downstream router may prune an outgoing interface for the multicast group to prevent the downstream router from forwarding multicast traffic for the multicast group toward the RP. The downstream router may terminate or propagate the RP-prune control message to a further downstream router.

Abstract: Techniques are described for reducing unnecessary upstream traffic toward a rendezvous point (RP) of a network using Protocol Independent Multicast Bidirectional Mode. The techniques include determining whether the RP needs to receive multicast traffic for a multicast group and, when the RP does not need to receive the multicast traffic, sending RP-prune control messages for the multicast group to downstream routers. Upon receiving an RP-prune control message, a downstream router may prune an outgoing interface for the multicast group to prevent the downstream router from forwarding multicast traffic for the multicast group toward the RP. The downstream router may terminate the RP-prune control message or propagate the RP-prune control message to a further downstream router. Routers that send RP-prune control messages also create or update a RP-prune state for the multicast group that includes interfaces for the downstream routers to which the RP-prune control messages were sent.

Abstract: A multicast non-stop forwarding (NSF) router architecture enhances high availability of a multicast router in a computer network. The router architecture further preserves multicast data forwarding through a data plane during NSF recovery of one or more failures in a control plane of the router. Various multicast components of the router cooperate to provide a checkpointing and recovery technique of the multicast NSF architecture that enables efficient restart and recovery of the control plane failures without loss of data connectivity.

Abstract: A multicast non-stop forwarding (NSF) router architecture enhances high availability of a multicast router in a computer network. The router architecture further preserves multicast data forwarding through a data plane during NSF recovery of one or more failures in a control plane of the router. Various multicast components of the router cooperate to provide a checkpointing and recovery technique of the multicast NSF architecture that enables efficient restart and recovery of the control plane failures without loss of data connectivity.