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Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) is a reliable multicast transport protocol. PGM provides a reliable sequence of packets to multiple recipients simultaneously, making it suitable for applications like multi-receiver file-transfer.

Overview

Multicast is a network addressing method for the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once, creating copies only when the links to the multiple destinations split (typically Network switches and routers). However, like the User Datagram Protocol, multicast does not guarantee the delivery of a message stream. Messages may be dropped, delivered multiple times, or delivered out of order. A reliable multicast protocol, like PGM, adds the ability for receivers to detect lost and/or out-of-order messages and take corrective action (similar in principal to TCP, resulting in a gap-free, in-order message stream.

PGM is an IETF experimental protocol. It is not yet a standard, but has been implemented in some networking devices and operating systems, including Windows XP and later versions of Microsoft Windows. Talarian's SmartSockets also supports PGM ("SmartPGM").

External links

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