3-8. IGMP Snooping
The function, IGMP Snooping, is used to establish the multicast groups to forward the multicast packet to the member ports, and, in nature, avoids wasting the bandwidth while IP multicast packets are running over the network. This is because a switch that does not support IGMP or IGMP Snooping can not tell the multicast packet from the broadcast packet, so it can only treat them all as the broadcast packet. Without IGMP Snooping, the multicast packet forwarding function is plain and nothing is different from broadcast packet.
A switch supported IGMP Snooping with the functions of query, report and leave, a type of packet exchanged between IP Multicast Router/Switch and IP Multicast Host, can update the information of the Multicast table when a member (port) joins or leaves an IP Multicast Destination Address. With this function, once a switch receives an IP multicast packet, it will forward the packet to the members who joined in a specified IP multicast group before.
The packets will be discarded by the IGMP Snooping if the user transmits multicast packets to the multicast group that had not been built up in advance.
Fig.
Function name:
IGMP Snooping
Function description:
IGMP is used to snoop the status of IP multicast groups and display its associated information in both tagged VLAN and
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