The economy of bandwidth transit across the Internet’s “Network of Networks” is complicated. It became this way organically. It continues to adapt to volatile market forces, technology change, and paradigm shifts. The arcane economics of the esoteric “horse trading” of peered bandwidth, and transit pricing packages will likely be the fodder of innumerable doctoral theses. (None of which will get a Nobel Prize.)
The technical landscape of internet bandwidth is ripe with adaptations in performance and efficiency improvements.
Border Gateway Protocol, [BGP] has long been the standard gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among “Autonomous Systems” [AS] on the Internet. BGP makes routing decisions based on paths, and network policies. It works, but its limitations are showing.
To Augment BGP, “Segment Routing” made possible by IPv6 [SRv6] is being promoted by Networking heavyweight Cisco. (Trate, 2017) A twist on this; SRv6+, is being promoted by Juniper networks. (Alston, 2019) In brief, SRv6 prescribes how IPv6 packets may carry specific instructions of how to route and even add processing to the traffic, as it journeys the network. Various network operators are already jockeying for opportunity in this tumult of evolving network capabilities. (NOIA Network, 2019)
The implementation of Multicast in SRv6 has relevancy to additional use cases, and improved efficiencies. Most recently, two methods for this have been the subject of development. These are Bit Index Explicit Replication [BIER], and Ingress Replication [IR], a.k.a. “Spray Multicast”.
Hybrid VoD 