Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

Navigation

Understanding Static RP

Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) sparse mode is the most common multicast protocol used on the Internet. PIM sparse mode is the default mode whenever PIM is configured on any interface of the device. However, because PIM must not be configured on the network management interface, you must disable it on that interface.

Each any-source multicast (ASM) group has a shared tree through which receivers learn about new multicast sources and new receivers learn about all multicast sources. The rendezvous point (RP) router is the root of this shared tree and receives the multicast traffic from the source. To receive multicast traffic from the groups served by the RP, the device must determine the IP address of the RP for the source.

You can configure a static rendezvous point (RP) configuration that is similar to static routes. A static configuration has the benefit of operating in PIM version 1 or version 2. When you configure the static RP, the RP address that you select for a particular group must be consistent across all routers in a multicast domain.

One common way for the device to locate RPs is by static configuration of the IP address of the RP. A static configuration is simple and convenient. However, if the statically defined RP router becomes unreachable, there is no automatic failover to another RP router. To remedy this problem, you can use anycast RP.

Published: 2014-07-23