Does one size fit all?: the impact of policy on multicast mechanism for future network

The rapid growth of diverse applications and services over the Internet poses significant challenges to the traditional multicast routing protocols. However, in most of the existing multicast routing protocols such as PIM-SSM, policy and mechanism are strict-coupling. This makes them hard to fit for different kinds of application demands. In this paper, we propose a Policy and Mechanism Isolation(PMI) multicast routing protocol, which aims at decoupling the policy and mechanism. Based on PMI, more provider policies, which further improve the effect and efficiency of the multicast mechanism, can be infused in to it. A parameter gradient-based multicast routing mechanism is presented to testify the flexibility of the proposed protocol. Preliminary results show that our mechanism is more adaptive than SPT, which is used in PIM-SSM.