The IESG has received a request from the BGP Enabled Services WG (bess) to consider the following document: - 'MVPN: Using Bidirectional P-Tunnels' <draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-bidir-03.txt> as Proposed Standard The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2015-03-18. Exceptionally, comments may be sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting. Abstract A set of prior RFCs specify procedures for supporting multicast in BGP/MPLS IP VPNs. These procedures allow customer multicast data to travel across a service provider's backbone network through a set of multicast tunnels. The tunnels are advertised in certain BGP multicast "auto-discovery" routes, by means of a BGP attribute known as the "Provider Multicast Service Interface (PMSI) Tunnel attribute". Encodings have been defined that allow the PMSI Tunnel attribute to identify bidirectional (multipoint-to-multipoint) multicast distribution trees. However, the prior RFCs do not provide all the necessary procedures for using bidirectional tunnels to support multicast VPNs. This document updates RFCs 6513, 6514 and 6625 by specifying those procedures. In particular, it specifies the procedures for assigning customer multicast flows (unidirectional or bidirectional) to specific bidirectional tunnels in the provider backbone, for advertising such assignments, and for determining which flows have been assigned to which tunnels. The file can be obtained via http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-bidir/ IESG discussion can be tracked via http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-bidir/ballot/ The following IPR Declarations may be related to this I-D: http://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2405/