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[Simon Leinen <>]

Tim Chown writes:
> The question with multicast of course comes back to use cases.
> It’s fantastic the bier support is now there, but what use cases might
> we apply it to for the R&E domain?  There’s not exactly a lot of
> content out there.  There’s been a recent push in the IETF to
> deprecate inter-domain traditional ASM (which I was a draft author on)

Right, that came out last August as RFC 8815.

> and to promote AMT (“multicast to the grandma”), but less so with bier
> (so far!).  Are there use cases we could look at?

This GÉANT/EUMETSAT collaboration famously uses multicast:

https://impact.geant.org/portfolio/eumetsat/

This type of use cases should be supported by BIER, provided we can
bring this to the end sites.  As for the backbone, it could be a nice
application for a RARE/Tofino-based overlay - we could remove the burden
of multicast routing from the backbone routers if that's desired.

(Personally I don't think multicast is such a great fit for content
distribution, and would rather look into (federated) CDN/storage
services operated by the NREN community, but there doesn't seem to be
enough collective willingness to build "cloud-like" infrastructure, so
I'll shut up.)

(And network coding/COINRG might be another area to look into for these
kinds of "data flooding" applications - distribute different parts of
information over different links in the topology and reconstruct the
original bits at the ends.)

Cheers,
-- 
Simon.