Intent to Prototype: API for receiving multicast

[Mortensen, Christian]

Contact emails

cw...@akamai.com, jhol...@akamai.com

 

Explainer

Our explainer and it is shared here.

 

Design doc/Spec

For now we only have the explainer.

 

Summary

We want to implement an API that allows the reception of native multicast packets. The implementation will only allow multicast packets to be received that have been authenticated through the AMBI protocol which has been proposed for adoption by the IETF.

 

Motivation

We believe that in order for the Internet to scale to future demands, multicast is needed. Further information is in the explainer linked above.

 

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

The proposed protocols needed to make this work will not be approved by IETF. Or the API will not be approved by W3C.

 

Ergonomics

For performance reasons, we expect this to often be used together with WebAssembly.

 

Activation

We expect the application to always fall back to unicast in case this API or multicast data is not available. There is an activation risk if the application does not do that.

 

Debuggability

The DevTools network tracker should be extended to provide information about which multicast flows the page is subscribed to and how much data it has received on them.

 

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

yes

 

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

No dashboard entry planned until requesting approval to ship.

 

Requesting approval to ship?

No