AMT

As Internet audience sizes for high-interest live events reach unprecedented levels and bitrates climb to support formats and applications such as 4K, 8K, and Augmented Reality (AR), live streaming can place a unique type of stress upon network resources. TreeDN is a tree-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) architecture designed to address the distinctive scaling challenges of live streaming to mass audiences. TreeDN enables operators to offer Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) at a fraction of the cost of traditional, unicast-based CDNs -- in some cases, at no additional cost to the infrastructure. In addition to efficiently utilizing network resources to deliver existing multi-destination traffic, this architecture also enables new types of content and use cases that previously were not possible or economically viable using traditional CDN approaches. Finally, TreeDN is a decentralized architecture and a democratizing technology that makes content distribution more accessible to more people by dramatically reducing the costs of replication.

This document updates RFC 7450, "Automatic Multicast Tunneling" (or AMT), by modifying the relay discovery process. A new DNS resource record named AMTRELAY is defined for publishing AMT relays for source-specific multicast channels. The reverse IP DNS zone for a multicast sender's IP address is configured to use AMTRELAY resource records to advertise a set of AMT relays that can receive and forward multicast traffic from that sender over an AMT tunnel. Other extensions and clarifications to the relay discovery process are also defined.

This document examines the use of Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) across inter-domain peering points for a specified set of deployment scenarios. The objectives are to (1) describe the setup process for multicast-based delivery across administrative domains for these scenarios and (2) document supporting functionality to enable this process.

This document describes Automatic Multicast Tunneling (AMT), a protocol for delivering multicast traffic from sources in a multicast-enabled network to receivers that lack multicast connectivity to the source network. The protocol uses UDP encapsulation and unicast replication to provide this functionality.

The AMT protocol is specifically designed to support rapid deployment by requiring minimal changes to existing network infrastructure.