The IESG has approved the following document: - 'MVPN: Using Bidirectional P-Tunnels' (draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-bidir-04.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the BGP Enabled Services Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Alvaro Retana, Alia Atlas and Deborah Brungard. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-bidir/ Technical Summary 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. Working Group Summary The consensus for adoption back in 2011 was rough, with a few contributors disagreeing on the scope that bidir P-tunnels should apply to. This debate has settled down a long time ago and the document has evolved since; no disagreement was expressed in the last years, nor during the last calls. Document Quality The document is believe to be of good quality by the shepherd. It can be noted that it was written by a co-autor of the base mVPN specs based on an understanding of underspecified areas, which are now addressed. It has been indicated that Cisco has implemented the two main methods described by these specs, the Flat Partitioned Method (with MP2MP LSPs) and the Unpartitioned method (with MP2MP LSPs and also with BIDIR-PIM). The document had two thorough reviews (by a WG contributor and by the shepherd), leading to substantive changes in the document. Personnel Thomas Morin is the Document Shepherd. Alvaro Retana is the Responsible Area Director.
