Network Programming with Perl

Unicasting versus Broadcasting

Consider an application in which information must be sent to many clients simultaneously. An Internet teleconferencing system is one example. Another is a server that sends out periodic time synchronization signals. You could implement such a system using conventional network protocols in a couple of ways:

1. Using TCP Accept incoming connections from clients that wish to subscribe to the service, and create a connected socket for each one. Call syswrite() on each socket every time you need to send information.

2. Using UDP Accept incoming messages from clients and add each client's IP address and port number to a list of subscribers. Each time we want to send information, we iterate over each client's destination ...