• The scalability components improve on the efficiency of handling increases (or decreases) in service users (receivers) and service load (sources or content).

• New algorithms and processes (such as aggregated join messages, which deliver up to 1000 individual messages in a single packet) reduce the time to reach convergence by a factor of 10.

• Multicast subsecond convergence improves service availability for large multicast networks.

• Multicast users such as financial services firms and brokerages receive better quality of service (QoS), because multicast functionality is restored in a fraction of the time previously required.

The Multicast Subsecond Convergence feature provides scalability enhancements that improve on the efficiency of handling increases (or decreases) in service users (receivers) and service load (sources or content). Scalability enhancements in this release include the following:

• Improved Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and PIM state maintenance through new timer management techniques

• Improved scaling of the Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) Source-Active (SA) cache

The scalability enhancements provide the following benefits:

• Increased potential PIM multicast route (mroute), IGMP, and MSDP SA cache state capacity

• Decreased CPU usage

Multicast subsecond convergence allows you to send PIM router query messages (PIM hellos) every few milliseconds. The PIM hello message is used to locate neighboring PIM devices. Before the introduction of this feature, the device could send the PIM hellos only every few seconds. By enabling a device to send PIM hello messages more often, this feature allows the device to discover unresponsive neighbors more quickly. As a result, the device can implement failover or recovery procedures more efficiently.

Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (RPF) helps to mitigate problems caused by the introduction of malformed or forged IP source addresses into a network by discarding IP packets that lack a verifiable IP source address. Malformed or forged source addresses can indicate denial-of-service (DoS) attacks based on source IP address spoofing.

RPF uses access control lists (ACLs) in determining whether to drop or forward data packets that have malformed or forged IP source addresses. An option in the ACL commands allows system administrators to log information about dropped or forwarded packets. Logging information about forged packets can help in uncovering information about possible network attacks.

Per-interface statistics can help system administrators quickly discover the interface serving as the entry point for an attack on the network.

PIM is designed to forward IP multicast traffic using the standard unicast routing table. PIM uses the unicast routing table to decide if the source of the IP multicast packet has arrived on the optimal path from the source. This process, the RPF check, is protocol-independent because it is based on the contents of the unicast routing table and not on any particular routing protocol.

Multicast subsecond convergence provides the ability to trigger a check of RPF changes for mroute states. This check is triggered by unicast routing changes. By performing a triggered RPF check, users can set the periodic RPF check to a relatively high value (for example, 10 seconds) and still fail over quickly.

The triggered RPF check enhancement reduces the time needed for service to be restored after disruption, such as for single service events (for example, in a situation with one source and one receiver) or as the service scales along any parameter (for example, many sources, many receivers, and many interfaces). This enhancement decreases in time-to-converge PIM (mroute), IGMP, and MSDP (SA cache) states.

In an unstable unicast routing environment that uses triggered RPF checks, the environment could be constantly triggering RPF checks, which places a burden on the resources of the device. To avoid this problem, use the ip multicast rpf backoff command to prevent a second triggered RPF check from occurring for the length of time configured. That is, the PIM “backs off” from another triggered RPF check for a minimum amount of milliseconds as configured by the user.

If the backoff period expires without further routing table changes, PIM then scans for routing changes and accordingly establishes multicast RPF changes. However, if more routing changes occur during the backoff period, PIM doubles the backoff period to avoid overloading the device with PIM RPF changes while the routing table is still converging.

The Multicast Subsecond Convergence feature set enhances both enterprise and service provider network backbones by providing almost instantaneous recovery of multicast paths after unicast routing recovery.

Because PIM relies on the unicast routing table to calculate its RPF when a change in the network topology occurs, unicast protocols first need to calculate options for the best paths for traffic, and then multicast can determine the best path.

Multicast subsecond convergence allows multicast protocol calculations to finish almost immediately after the unicast calculations are completed. As a result, multicast traffic forwarding is restored substantially faster after a topology change.