TOI Author :: Rajesh Velandy

Bidirectional Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) allows routers to build trees to deliver multicast traffic from sources to receivers. It is a variant of sparse-mode PIM that efficiently addresses the use case where receivers for a multicast group are also sources for that group. While sparse-mode PIM builds shared trees and source-specific trees, bidirectional PIM only builds shared trees. A shared tree for a multicast group is rooted at the Rendezvous Point (RP) for that group. The RP for a bidirectional group is an IP address, which may or may not be real, but is reachable via all routers in the multicast domain. There may be multiple RPs in a multicast domain.

Hardware counter feature allows enabling counters for features using programmable hardware counter resources.