There are currently no provisions in the Bundle Protocol for multidestination delivery of
bundle payloads. Ideally, however, a multicast delivery capability inherent to DTN will
eventually be defined, complete with a DTN multicast group management protocol to enable
the formation of DTN multicast groups, the association of each group with a DTN multicast
group address, and the ability to add and remove DTN endpoints from these multicast
groups. A native DTN multicast capability will also require the definition of a DTN multicast
routing protocol to enable each DTN router to determine on which interfaces a bundle
destined for a multicast group address should be forwarded. While such a native DTN
multicast capability is desirable, its definition does not seem imminent. In the meantime,
before all the components necessary for such a full-scale native DTN multicast capability are
in place, it has been proposed that the DTN Bundle Protocol be modified with the optional
ability to provide a modified form of multicast, which we will call "multidestination
delivery". Multidestination delivery can conserve DTN bandwidth by ensuring that a given
payload sent from a single source traverses each link of the DTN at most once, no matter
how many destinations to which the payload is addressed.
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