Jon Crowcroft (UCL) discussed the charter of the group, and summarised progress to date. He introduced the new requirements draft (draft-ietf-lsma-requirements-00), and noted the broader scope of that draft, compared with some of the earlier work of this group which has focussed on DIS.
Peter Bagnall (BT) presented the new requirements draft. This draft defines a classification scheme for the communication requirements of large scale multicast applications. Aims to define a taxonomy of requirements, at a fairly high level, without trying to define mechanisms by which these are achieved. This work is looking at a much broader set of applications than just DIS. This draft must now be distilled down to a more specific list of network requirements, rather than just interesting requirements for large scale applications. Further work is clearly needed.
A brief discussion of how to support QoS for large heterogeneous multicast groups followed. Given that we likely cannot support the required QoS for all members of such a group, how do we cope with failure? Do we just drop receivers? Have some receivers present, but with reduced QoS? Adapt all receivers to the achievable QoS level? Etc?
The scenarios and limitations drafts should go to last call soon, since they are fairly stable, and document clear problems. The new requirements draft is starting to look at a more general area, and a new working group may be needed to look into these other requirements.