PIM Anycast RP

PIM Anycast RP is a method of providing load balancing and fast convergence to PIM RPs in an IPv4 multicast domain. The RP address of the Anycast RP is a shared address used among multiple PIM routers, known as PIM RP. The PIM RP routers create an Anycast RP set. Each router in the Anycast RP set is configured using two IP addresses; a shared RP address in their loopback address and a separate, unique ip address. The loopback address must be reachable by all PIM routers in the multicast domain. The separate, unique ip address is configured to establish static peering with other PIM routers and communication with the peers.

When the source is activated in a PIM Anycast RP domain, the PIM First Hop (FH) will register the source to the closet PIM RP. The PIM RP follows the same MSDP Anycast RP operation by decapsulating the packet and creating the (s,g) state. If there are external peers in the Anycast RP set, the router will re-encapsulate the packet with the local peering address as the source address of the encapsulation. The router will unicast the packet to all Anycast RP peers. The re-encapsulation of the data register packet to Anycast RP peers ensures source state distribution to all RPs in a multicast domain.