IP Addressing Fundamentals

The Concept of Multicasting

The basic concept of multicasting is simple enough: Reduce the total amount of bandwidth you consume by forwarding a single stream of IP packets to multiple recipients simultaneously. That was easy enough to say, but several assumptions and concepts that require further scrutiny are submerged in that definition.

The first assumption is that multicasting implies a type of communication in which two or more recipients want to receive the same data at the same time. You might wonder why you would want to send the same stream of packets to more than one destination. What practical purpose could that serve? From the perspective of the nontechnical end user, it can be difficult to imagine a scenario in which you would benefit ...