IETF RFC 7582 PDF

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.