Huawei Quidway S5600 Series Operation Manual page 414

Operation Manual – Multicast Protocol
Quidway S5600 Series Ethernet Switches-Release 1510
Host registration: A receiving host dynamically registers or deregisters with a
multicast
deregistration.
Multicast routing: A router or switch establishes a packet distribution tree and
transports packets from a multicast source to receivers.
Multicast application: A multicast source must support multicast applications,
such as video conferencing. The TCP/IP protocol stack must support the function
of sending and receiving multicast information.
1.2.1 Multicast Address
As receivers are multiple hosts in a multicast group, you should be concerned about the
following questions:
What destination should the information source send the information to in the
multicast mode?
How to select the destination address, that is, how does the information source
know who the user is?
These questions are about multicast addressing. To enable the communication
between the information source and members of a multicast group (a group of
information receivers), network-layer multicast addresses, namely, IP multicast
addresses must be provided. In addition, a technology must be available to map IP
multicast addresses to link-layer MAC multicast addresses. The following sections
describe these two types of multicast addresses:
I. IP multicast address
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) categorizes IP addresses into five classes:
A, B, C, D, and E. Unicast packets use IP addresses of Class A, B, and C based on
network scales. Class D IP addresses are used as destination addresses of multicast
packets. Class D address must not appear in the IP address field of a source IP
address of IP packets. Class E IP addresses are reserved for future use.
In unicast data transport, a data packet is transported hop by hop from the source
address to the destination address. In an IP multicast environment, there are a group of
destination addresses (called group address), rather than one address. All the
receivers join a group. Once they join the group, the data sent to this group of
addresses starts to be transported to the receivers. All the members in this group can
receive the data packets. This group is a multicast group.
A multicast group has the following characteristics:
group to implement
Huawei Technologies Proprietary
1-6
Chapter 1 Multicast Overview
multicast membership registration and