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Bidirectional PIM Applications
Bidirectional Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM-Bidir) is one of the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) protocols. It provides an alternative to other PIM modes. Bidirectional PIM is designed to support many-to-many multicast applications within a single PIM domain.
Bidirectional PIM has several key advantages over a PIM sparse mode deployment:
- It reduces the amount of state which a router must store.
- It scales very well when there are many sources for each group.
- It can scale to an arbitrary number of sources.
- It provides better support for intermittent sources.
- It is a less complicated protocol.
It does not rely on data triggered events such as:
- Source registration
- Shortest-path tree switchover
- The rendezvous point can be configured as an address that is not assigned to any particular device.
Bidirectional PIM is used by large content providers to support:
- Video conferencing
- Financial applications
- Distributing product and customer data between servers in a large network of datacenters
- Distributed inventory polling
- Online gaming
