RP Mapping with Anycast RP

For the purposes of load balancing and redundancy, you can configure anycast RP. When you configure anycast RP, you bypass the restriction of having one active RP per multicast group, and instead deploy multiple RPs for the same group range. The RP routers share one unicast IP address. Sources from one RP are known to other RPs that use MSDP. Sources and receivers use the closest RP, as determined by the interior gateway protocol (IGP).

You can use anycast RP within a domain to provide redundancy and RP load sharing. When an RP goes down, sources and receivers are taken to a new RP by means of unicast routing.

Anycast RP is defined in Internet draft draft-ietf-mboned-anycast-rp-08.txt, Anycast RP Mechanism Using PIM and MSDP. To access Internet RFCs and drafts, go to the IETF Web site at http://www.ietf.org.

We recommend a static RP mapping with anycast RP and a bootstrap router (BSR) with auto-RP configuration because static mapping provides all the benefits of a bootstrap router and auto-RP without the complexity of the full BSR and auto-RP mechanisms.

See also Example: Configuring PIM Anycast with or without MSDP.