February 1998
Intermediate to advanced
368 pages
10h 7m
English
This chapter lays the foundation for a discussion of multicast routing protocols. The duties of a multicast router, including the interaction between multicast hosts and routers, are explained. Beginning with a historical examination of broadcast forwarding, the two multicast forwarding paradigms, source-based trees and shared trees, are presented. We end with a description of the MBONE, the Internet’s multicast routing overlay.
A network multicast capability allows an application to send a single datagram that will be delivered to multiple recipients. Applications exhibiting one-to-many and many-to-many communication patterns find multicast extremely useful—the alternative, namely, ...