SMC Networks SMC6224M manual Multicast Filtering, 184

CONFIGURING THE SWITCH

Multicast Filtering

Multicasting is used to support real-time applications such as videoconferencing or streaming audio. A multicast server does not have to establish a separate connection with each client. It merely broadcasts its service to the network, and any hosts that want to receive the multicast register with their local multicast switch/router. Although this approach reduces the network overhead required by a multicast server, the broadcast traffic must be carefully pruned at every multicast switch/router it passes through to ensure that traffic is only passed on to the hosts which subscribed to this service.

Unicast Flow

Multicast Flow

This switch uses IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) to query for any attached hosts that want to receive a specific multicast service. It identifies the ports containing hosts requesting to join the service and sends data out to those ports only. It then propagates the service request up to any neighboring multicast switch/router to ensure that it will continue to receive the multicast service. This procedure is called multicast filtering.

The purpose of IP multicast filtering is to optimize a switched network’s performance, so multicast packets will only be forwarded to those ports containing multicast group hosts or multicast routers/switches, instead of flooding traffic to all ports in the subnet (VLAN).

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