SSM-ping: A ping utility for source specific multicast

Management has become a key concern for the success of multicast deployment in the Internet. One of the most important management tasks for multicast is to verify the availability of the service to its users. This task is referred to as discovering or testing reachability. In this paper, we present a new mechanism, SSM-Ping, for discovering multicast reachability between (remote) end systems in Source Specific Multicast (SSM) enabled networks. SSM-Ping uses the existing Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) based multicast join mechanism in the network and requires a simple extension to the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). First, we motivate our work by discussing the need for an efficient and effective ping utility for multicast. Then, we present the SSM-Ping operation and discuss a number of deployment and security issues. Finally, we outline our inter-domain scale experimental evaluation approach for SSM-Ping.