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Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) is a family of multicast routing protocols that can provide one-to-many and many-to-many distribution of data over the Internet. The "protocol-independent" part refers to the fact that PIM does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other traditional routing protocols such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

There are four variants of PIM:

• PIM Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) explicitly builds unidirectional shared trees rooted at a Rendezvous Point (RP) per group, and optionally creates shortest-path trees per source. PIM-SM generally scales fairly well for wide-area usage. See the PIM Internet Standard RFC 4601
• PIM Dense Mode (PIM-DM) implicitly builds shortest-path trees by flooding multicast traffic domain wide, and then pruning back branches of the tree where no receivers are present. PIM-DM generally has poor scaling properties. See experimental RFC 3973
• Bidirectional PIM explicitly builds shared bi-directional trees. It never builds a shortest path tree, so may have longer end-to-end delays than PIM-SM, but scales well because it needs no source-specific state. see draft-ietf-pim-bidir
• PIM Source Specific Multicast (PIM-SSM) builds trees that are rooted in just one source, offering a more secure and scalable model for a limited amount of applications (mostly broadcasting of content). In SSM, an IP datagram is transmitted by a source S to an SSM destination address G, and receivers can receive this datagram by subscribing to channel (S,G). See informational RFC 3569

Of the four, PIM-SM has the widest deployment.