MBONE Etiquette

From: Stephen Casner, CASNER@ISI.EDU,
Fri 10 Dec 93 17:01:20 PST

There are no formal procedures for scheduling the use of the MBONE, at least not yet. Management of the bandwidth is a cooperative procedure depending upon the good behaviour of the participants. Typically, discussion of the use of the mbone happens on the rem-conf@es.net mailing list. Some discussion also occurs on the mbone mailing list, though the mbone list is intended more for mbone engineering issues, testing of multicast software, etc.

Many events are announced by a message to rem-conf. An announcement might ask for expressions of interest or objections in order to guage whether the event would be appropriate to broadcast. Then, events are usually advertised using sd so that interested recipients can easily join. So far, there has not been any significant objection to the content of scheduled events. Generally, the events have been on topics "of interest to the networking community" because most of the MBONE participants at this point are network hackers (not all -- please no one take offense).

We've been lucky so far that conflicts have not been a big problem. With a wider user community, we'd start getting conflicts between, for example, conferences for physicists and historians occurring at the same time. This week, the NASA Shuttle transmission ran all week, but they cut back the rate of the video during a couple of other events by request. It's clear that as the MBONE grows and the capability to transmit becomes available at more events, more conflicts will occur. So far, folks have been reluctant to establish more formal procedures (either to be the czar or to submit to one).

Eventually, multicast service and real-time service will be integrated into the whole network, and usage will be managed by cost. For some sufficiently large value of eventually, that is.

   -- Steve