3com 8807 User Guide

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PIM-DM C
ONFIGURATION
PIM-DM Overview
Introduction to PIM-DM
PIM-DM (Protocol Independent Multicast, Dense Mode) belongs to dense mode 
multicast routing protocols. PIM-DM is suitable for small networks. Members of 
multicast groups are relatively dense in such network environments.
PIM-DM Working 
Principle
The working procedures of PIM-DM include neighbor discovery, flood & prune and 
graft.
Neighbor discovery
The PIM-DM router needs to use Hello messages to perform neighbor discovery 
when it is started. All network nodes running PIM-DM keep in touch with one 
another with Hello messages, which are sent periodically.
Flood&Prune
PIM-DM assumes that all hosts on the network are ready to receive multicast data. 
When a multicast source "S" begins to send data to a multicast group "G", after 
the router receives the multicast packets, the router will perform RPF check 
according to the unicast routing table first. If the RPF check is passed, the router 
will create an (S, G) entry and then flood the data to all downstream PIM-DM 
nodes. If the RPF check is not passed, that is, multicast packets enter from an error 
interface, the packets will be discarded. After this process, an (S, G) entry will be 
created in the PIM-DM multicast domain.
If the downstream node has no multicast group members, it will send a Prune 
message to the upstream nodes to inform the upstream node not to forward data 
to the downstream node. Receiving the prune message, the upstream node will 
remove the corresponding interface from the outgoing interface list corresponding 
to the multicast forwarding entry (S, G). In this way, a SPT (Shortest Path Tree) 
rooted at Source S is built. The pruning process is initiated by leaf routers first.
This process is called "flood & prune" process. In addition, nodes that are pruned 
provide timeout mechanism. Each router re-starts the "flood & prune" process 
upon pruning timeout. The consistent "flood & prune" process of PIM-DM is 
performed periodically.
During this process, PIM-DM uses the RPF check and the existing unicast routing 
table to build a multicast forwarding tree rooted at the data source. When a 
packet arrives, the router will first judge the correctness of the path. If the 
interface that the packet arrives is the one indicated by the unicast routing to the 
multicast source, the packet is regarded to be from the correct path. Otherwise, 
the packet will be discarded as a redundancy packet without the multicast