The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Automatic Multicast Tunneling' (draft-ietf-mboned-auto-multicast-18.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the MBONE Deployment Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Joel Jaeggli and Benoit Claise. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mboned-auto-multicast/ Technical Summary The advantages and benefits provided by multicast technologies are well known. There are a number of application areas that are ideal candidates for the use of multicast, including media broadcasting, video conferencing, collaboration, real-time data feeds, data replication, and software updates. Unfortunately, many of these applications lack multicast connectivity to networks that carry traffic generated by multicast sources. The reasons for the lack of connectivity vary, but are primarily the result of service provider policies and network limitations. Automatic Multicast Tunneling (AMT) is a protocol that uses UDP-based encapsulation to overcome the aforementioned lack of multicast connectivity. AMT enables sites, hosts or applications that do not have native multicast access to a network with multicast connectivity to a source, to request and receive SSM [RFC4607] and ASM [RFC1112] traffic from a network that does provide multicast connectivity to that source. Working Group Summary This document has received strong support from the working group and no major controversies existed prior to the arriving at the IESG with this document. Subsequent to the previous IESG review, efforts have been made to address IESG discuss issues, deal with IANA concerns and spin up new work associated with congestion guidance for multicast applications. Document Quality A number of AMT implementations exist today and significant deployment experience has been documented. This document has received thorough review from the working group, and many have contributed to this effort over the last 11+ years. In particular, Dave Thaler, Tom Pusateri, Thomas Morin and Greg Bumgardner deserve credit for most of the authorship of this document, and Bob Sayko, Doug Nortz and their colleagues at ATT deserve credit for extremely thorough review of the document. Personnel Lenny Giuliano is the Document Shepherd, Joel Jaeggli is the Responsible Area Director. RFC Editor Note OLD> Gateway support for the Teardown message is OPTIONAL but RECOMMENDED. NEW> Gateway support for the Teardown message is RECOMMENDED. Please move the reference to [RFC1321] from the NORMATIVE reference section to the INFORMATIVE reference section.
