RFC 3376 - Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 3

Network Working Group
Request for Comments: 3376
Obsoletes: 2236
Category: Standards Track
B. Cain
Cereva Networks
S. Deering
I. Kouvelas
Cisco Systems
B. Fenner
AT&T Labs - Research
A. Thyagarajan
Ericsson
October 2002

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

This document specifies Version 3 of the Internet Group Management Protocol, IGMPv3. IGMP is the protocol used by IPv4 systems to report their IP multicast group memberships to neighboring multicast routers. Version 3 of IGMP adds support for "source filtering", that is, the ability for a system to report interest in receiving packets only from specific source addresses, or from all but specific source addresses, sent to a particular multicast address. That information may be used by multicast routing protocols to avoid delivering multicast packets from specific sources to networks where there are no interested receivers.

This document obsoletes RFC 2236.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Service Interface for Requesting IP Multicast Reception
• 3. Multicast Reception State Maintained by Systems
• 4. Message Formats
• 5. Description of the Protocol for Group Members
• 6. Description of the Protocol for Multicast Routers
• 7. Interoperation With Older Versions of IGMP
• 8. List of Timers, Counters and Their Default Values
• 9. Security Considerations
• 10. IANA Considerations
• 11. Acknowledgments
• 12. Normative References
• 13. Informative References
• Appendix A. Design Rationale
• Appendix B. Summary of Changes from IGMPv2
• Author's Address
• Full Copyright Statement