Rendezvous Point Engineering

A Rendezvous Point (RP) is a router in a multicast network domain that acts as a shared root for a multicast shared tree. Any number of routers can be configured to work as RPs and they can be configured to cover different group ranges. For correct operation, every multicast router within a Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) domain must be able to map a particular multicast group address to the same RP. This paper attempts to describe, compare and contrast the different methods for deploying RPs.