PIM Snooping for VPLS

PIM snooping is introduced to restrict multicast traffic to interested devices in a VPLS. A new statement, pim-snooping, is introduced at the [edit routing-instances instance-name protocols] hierarchy level to configure PIM snooping on the PE device. PIM snooping configures a device to examine and operate only on PIM hello and join/prune packets. A PIM snooping device snoops PIM hello and join/prune packets on each interface to find interested multicast receivers and populates the multicast forwarding tree with this information. PIM snooping can also be configured on PE routers connected as pseudowires, which ensures that no new PIM packets are generated in the VPLS, with the exception of PIM messages sent through LDP on the pseudowire. PIM snooping improves IP multicast bandwidth in the VPLS core. Only devices that are members of a multicast group receive the multicast traffic meant for the group. This ensures network integrity and reliability, and multicast data transmission is secured.