Distributed Computing in Java 9

Multicasting

In the previous sections, we learned how to establish a connection and exchange data between one machine and another; this is known as point-to-point communication. But, what if we want to broadcast data over the network to multiple clients? In that case, a subset of the OP protocol that supports multicasting comes in handy.

To broadcast over multicast IP addresses using multicasting, UDP packets are used. Any client listening to a broadcasting IP will receive a broadcasted data packet. A good example of multicasting is broadcasting a video as well as audio of special events over the internet.

Using the java.net.MulticastSocket class, multicasting is possible. This class is an extension of the DatagramSocket class. Any class ...