SMC Networks SMC6924VF manual Multicast Filtering, Connecting Vlan Groups

ADVANCED TOPICS

Connecting VLAN Groups

The switch supports intra-VLAN communication using wire-speed switching. However, if you have devices in separate VLANs that must communicate, and it is not practical to include these devices in a common VLAN, then the VLANs can be connected via a Layer 3 switch (such as the SMC6724L3) or a router.

Multicast Filtering

Multicasting sends data to a group of nodes instead of a single destination. The simplest way to implement multicasting is to broadcast data to all nodes on the network. However, such an approach wastes a lot of bandwidth if the target group is small compared to overall the broadcast domain.

Since applications such as video conferencing and data sharing are more widely used today, efficient multicasting has become vital. A common approach is to use a group registration protocol that lets

4-6