IP Multicast Support

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IP Multicasting Overview

In addition to unicast and broadcast support, IP also provides a mechanism to send and receive IP multicast traffic. IP multicast traffic is sent to a single destination IP address but is received and processed by multiple IP hosts, regardless of their location on an IP internetwork. A host listens for a specific IP multicast address and receives all packets to that IP address.

IP multicast is more efficient than IP unicast or broadcast for one-to-many delivery of data. Unlike unicast, only one copy of the data is sent. Unlike broadcast, the traffic is only received and processed by computers that are listening for it.

The additional elements of IP multicast include the following:

IP multicast addresses, also known as group addresses, are in the class D range of 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 as defined by setting the first four high order bits to 1110. In network prefix or Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation, IP multicast addresses are summarized as 224.0.0.0/4. Multicast addresses in the range 224.0.0.0 to 224.0.0.255 (224.0.0.0/24) are reserved for the local subnet and are not forwarded by IP routers regardless of the Time to Live (TTL) in the IP header.

The IP multicast addresses from 224.0.1.0 to 238.255.255.255 are either reserved or assigned to a multicasting application. The addresses from 239.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 (239.0.0.0/8) are reserved for applications that can be administratively scoped. For more information about these addresses, see "Multicast Boundaries" later in this chapter.

The following are examples of reserved IP multicast addresses:

For the latest list of reserved multicast addresses, see the Information Sciences Institute link at http://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources.

For more information about IP multicast support, see Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 1112.

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