Freshening Up on IP
Though most readers are fairly familiar with IP, those interested in the original
work may want to review RFC 791, published in 1981. In RFC 791, Jon Postel
expresses, in standard form, the concepts of interworking and IP, first intro-
duced by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974 [2].
An excellent summary of recent items of interest for IP, most notably IP
address allocation of the 32-bit IP version 4 address space is provided in RFC
2102 [3].
IP multicasting has always played a large part in the Internet concepts on
conferencing and multimedia, although its deployment has been rather sparse
up to the present. A good overview on IP multicast applications is given in
RFC 3170 [4].
The relevant protocols for Internet multimedia and conferencing are sum-
marized in Table 5.1. We will provide in the following discussion a short list of
the main topics for Internet multimedia and refer the reader to Table 5.1 for the
applicable protocols. The headers in Table 5.1 refer to the protocols grouped
under the respective cross-header.
Table 5.1 Network Protocols for Internet Multimedia and Conferencing
NAME DOCUMENT SUBJECT
IP Unicast
Internet Protocol RFC 791 DARPA Internet Protocol
IP Policies RFC 2008 IP Address Allocation Policies
IP Multicast Protocols
SSM RFC 3569 Overview of Source Specific
Multicast
IGMP version 2 RFC 2236 Internet Group Management
Protocol
CBT version 2 RFC 2189 Core Based Tree Multicast Routing
PIM-DM RFC 3973 Protocol Independent Multicast-
Dense Mode
Multicast Address Allocation
MADCAP RFC 2907 MC Addressing Dynamic Client
Allocation
MASC RFC 2909 The Multicast Address-Set Claim
Protocol
BGMP RFC 3913 Border Gateway Multicast Protocol
(continued)
Real-Time Internet Multimedia 83