If Multicast is the Answer – What was the Question?
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Multicast is (almost) as old as the Internet, having become a tool for increasing network efficiency but also enabling destination discovery in a number of key use cases, although misaligned economic interests have limited its deployment to domain-local usages. But recent advances in multicast technologies as well as the identification of new use cases for which IP multicast may be ill fitted yet network-level support may be desirable motivate to re-think old perceptions of multicast and its use in the Internet overall. For this, we return to the original question to which multicast is seemingly the right answer, based on which we outline emerging new answers to what multicast intends to achieve. Key to this is to re-formulate the multicast question in an attempt to semantically and architecturally align different answers, opening opportunities for more use cases to be served through multicast solutions, thus also driving the need for more research in this space. Our paper poses this new vision for multicast and investigates the alignment of existing and emerging multicast solutions with it, leading us to formulate a path for future research.
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