CONFIGURING THE SWITCH
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 the hosts which subscribed to this service.
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).
Configuring IGMP Parameters
You can configure the switch to forward multicast traffic intelligently. Based on the IGMP query and report messages, the switch forwards traffic only to the ports that request multicast traffic. This prevents the switch from broadcasting the traffic to all ports and possibly disrupting network performance.
Command Usage
•IGMP Snooping – This switch can passively snoop on IGMP Query and Report packets transferred between IP multicast routers/switches and IP multicast host groups to identify the IP multicast group members. It simply monitors the IGMP packets passing through it, picks out the group registration information, and configures multicast filters accordingly.
