MPLS Traffic Engineering and Multicast ?

[g.mongatti]

Is it possibile to use MPLS Traffic Engineering for multicast traffic (sparse-mode PIM) ?

All the documents that I have found up to now speak about MPLS TE applied to unicast traffic, so I wonder if it is possible employ MPLS TE also for multicast.

Thank you.

[ahanspal]

MPLS Traffic Engineering does not support Multicast as of yet. There are developments in the IETF towards this direction. Cisco implementations will appear thereafter based on standards.

[g.mongatti]

Thank you very much for your explanation.

As a workaround, is it possible to use tunnel GRE to transport multicast in MPLS and so to exploit the feature Traffic Engineering?

Does it make sense according to you ?

Regards

[ahanspal]

Traffic Engineering requires a mechanism that is based on defining constraints like bandwidth and building "constrained" Shortest Paths. Unfortunately using GRE to transport Multicast does not provide this capability.

Cheers

Amrit