Talk:Protocol-Independent Multicast

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The content of PIM Sparse Mode was merged into Protocol-Independent Multicast on 2011-12-11. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

The content of Dense multicast was merged into Protocol-Independent Multicast on 2011-12-11. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

Should multicast link to IP Multicast in this case, too? Guess so. --SymlynX

PIM does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other traditional routing protocols such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). the traditionnal routing protocols are mainly OSPF or RIP in intradomain and MBGP with MSDP in interdomain.... My english is too bad to modify directly this page. FidelCastor (dynamic IP) 212.198.196.240 (talk) 22:43, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done Added references to most of these protocols Surrealvortex (talk) 18:51, 17 March 2012 (UTC)Surrealvortex[reply]

Merge

In connection with the suggestion that this page and PIM-SM should be merged; I would say NO. As the article says, PIM-SM is the most popular form, but there are four kinds of PIM, and merging all four into one article would be a big task and lead to an article which was probably too long to be easily digested and not that helpful to readers (please move this comment if it is in the wrong place). Ja malcolm (talk) 08:54, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I Support the proposed merges. None of the articles involved are very long at all. Doesn't look to me like the resultant article would be WP:TOOLONG. If it does get too long in the future, it can always be split again. It is generally good to have fewer articles early in the development of a topic. --Kvng (talk) 04:25, 24 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Done --Kvng (talk) 22:04, 11 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cut-and-paste issues

Part of this page is obviously cut-and-pasted from somewhere (<http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/archived-articles/376.html>?) as it refers to "routers E and F in the above picture" when there is no picture on the page.

Eric the Lemming (talk) 09:12, 31 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Who the hell is this Kvng douchebag?! He copy-pasted everything about PIM-DM from http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/archived-articles/376-pim-dense-mode.html. He didn't even bother to give them credit ffs. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.90.110.125 (talk) 13:41, 17 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The material came from PIM Sparse Mode or Dense multicast. This douchbag apologizes for not reviewing it carefully when I performed the merge. Thanks to Surrealvortex (talk · contribs) for cleaning it up. --Kvng (talk) 17:34, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing Listing of Variants

As is it might give the wrong impression that PIM-SM and PIM-SSM were exclusive modes. PIM-SSM is a subtype of PIM-SM though. Instead it should be PIM-SM (sparse mode) vs. PIM-DM (dense mode) and PIM-SSM (source-specific multicast) vs. PIM-ASM (any-source multicast) in my opinion. Also a bit confusingly, the PIM-SM RFC, RFC7761, does not call it PIM-ASM and instead refers to it as PIM-SSM vs. "regular IP Multicast" or "normal PIM-SM behavior". But I think ASM vs. SSM is what you'd typically find in literature on multicast these days? Also RFC8815 says ASM vs. SSM.

Also the statement "explicitly builds unidirectional shared trees rooted at a rendezvous point (RP) per group" for PIM-SM is not necessarily true when using PIM-SSM (which is still PIM-SM), maybe? As with PIM-SSM the RFC says: "then the DR may omit performing a (*,G) join to set up the shared tree, and instead issue a source-specific (S,G) join only". So there would then only be a PIM-Join from the DR (Designated Router) to S (Source), without an RP (Rendezvous Point) in between. (Or could/would one say that S is then also inherently the RP?)

The Bidir-PIM RFC introduction says it's a variant of PIM-SM. But more precisely sounds like a variant of PIM-ASM to me, as it says: "PIM-SM also allows the construction of source-specific trees, but this capability is not related to the protocol described in this document". But not 100% sure.

(I think all this might have also led to the misunderstanding for some people when RFC8815 introduced a "Best Current Practice" for "Deprecating Any-Source Multicast (ASM) for Interdomain Multicast": https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8815. Someone in the dn42 wiki for instance then (wrongly?) claimed that RFC8815 had deprecated PIM-SM: https://dn42.dev/howto/IPv6-Multicast#ipv6-multicast.)

WiPe-T-X (talk) 10:17, 4 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]