Pragmatic General Multicast

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Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) is a reliable multicast transport protocol. PGM provides a reliable sequence of packets to multiple recipients simultaneously, making it suitable for applications like file-transfer, streaming media and Internet television.

[edit] Overview

Reliable means in this case that the receiver of a multicast stream can detect if all packets involved in this stream were actually received and which packets were not received. This means PGM cannot guarantee delivery. Instead best-effort delivery and loss-detection are implemented.

PGM is an IETF experimental protocol. It is not yet a standard.

[edit] External links

• RFC 3208
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/randz/protocol/pgm_protocol.asp
• http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_0t/12_0t5/feature/guide/pgmscale.html
• http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/software/junos/junos85/swconfig85-multicast/id-11463816.html#id-11463816