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Multicast operating in all of RNP’s network

Implantation of new routers takes the service to all the country

RNP’s network is already ready to operate multicast in all the Brazilian states. Therefore, the clients connected to RNP’s Points of Presence (PoPs) will be able to have access to this advanced service of data transmission. This announcement was made by RNP’s Engineering and Operation Center (Centro de Engenharia e Operações – CEO) on January 19^th.

Multicast offers several advantages over the traditional means of data transmission – unicast and broadcast –, especially in the case of multimedia applications. With multicast, a single data flow, coming from a given source, can be simultaneously sent to different receivers, being up to the network infrastructure to replicate the flow when it is necessary. It is the opposite of what happens in the unicast mode, in which the same source needs to replicate the information as many times as there are receivers, using much more band than in the multicast mode. The broadcast mode is also a great band consumer since the data are sent from the same source to the entire network indistinctly, regardless of the number of interested receivers.

Among the benefits brought by the multicast technology, we can list the economy of resources and the optimized network performance, for less band is used by the service, avoiding jamming and permitting the use of other applications over the same infrastructure; the support to distributed applications, enabling such applications to be used in a measurable and effective way; and the scalability, once the multiplication of the flow is not made by the source, but by the network infrastructure itself.

Service already in use

The multicast service has been implanted at RNP since March 2002 and it is already widely used in several states. An example is the Professional Development Course for High School Math Teachers (Capmem), offered every semester by the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (Impa). Since 2002 it has been transmitted by RNP’s network, taking advantage of the multicast technology. Teachers in 14 states are participating in the first module of this course this year. The Capmem 2004/1 started on January 26^th and ends on Friday, January 30^th.

The users of RNP’s network can also establish multicast traffic with foreign networks having this kind of service, such as the Internet2, in the United States, the Canarie, in Canada, and the Géant, in Europe. With the creation of Clara network (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks - Cooperação Latino-Americana de Redes Avançadas), it will be possible to establish multicast flow directly among Latin American networks.

Multicast qualification

In order to prepare the people at the PoPs to deal with the new technology, the CEO has sent technician Adenilson Raniery to present a multicast workshop in RNP’s 9^th Seminar of Internal Qualification, which took place in Bahia, in November last year. Information has also been exchanged through a discussion list about this topic. To give basic orientations about this service, RNP’s Information Center has prepared some web pages on multicast, which can be seen at http://www.rnp.br/en/multicast/.

[RNP, 01.28.2004]