RFC 2432: Terminology for IP Multicast Benchmarking

Kevin Dubray (IronBridge Networks), 1998

Summary. This RFC defines general nomenclature to be used when benchmarking multicast forwarding devices.

More Detail

IP multicast forwarding is worth special consideration separate from unicast benchmarking for several reasons:

Forwarding devices may use different data paths for unicast and multicast.
Multicast forwarding routines may require different information such as source addresses.
Performance of certain multicast functions may vary on different devices. Such functions include but are not limited to:
- tunneling
- group joins and leaves
- traffic class differentiation

Terminology covers group join/leave overhead, forwarding throughput and latency, and some burdened measurements (measurements taken when the device is under a load other than the load being measured).

Note: This document considers only one-to-many multicasting. To measure scalability accurately, however, many-to-many multicasting should be considered. This would account for any per-source state that might affect scalability.

A companion RFC describing multicast benchmarking methodology is expected to be forthcoming akin to RFC 1242: Benchmarking Terminology for Network Interconnection Devices and the companion RFC 1944: Benchmarking Methodology for Network Interconnection Devices .