Chapter 16: Multicast; Multicast Forwarding Overview - Cisco 350 Series Administration Manual

Multicast

Multicast Forwarding Overview

Cisco 350, 350X and 550X Series Managed Switches, Firmware Release 2.4, ver 0.4
This section describes the Multicast Forwarding feature, and covers the following topics:
• Multicast Forwarding Overview
• Properties
• MAC Group Address
• IP Multicast Group Address
• IPv4 Multicast Configuration
• IPv6 Multicast Configuration
• IGMP/MLD Snooping IP Multicast Group
• Multicast Router Port
• Forward All
• Unregistered Multicast
Multicast forwarding enables one-to-many information dissemination. Multicast applications
are useful for dissemination of information to multiple clients, where clients do not require
reception of the entire content. A typical application is a cable-TV-like service, where clients
can join a channel in the middle of a transmission, and leave before it ends.
The data is sent only to relevant ports. Forwarding the data only to the relevant ports conserves
bandwidth and host resources on links.
By default, all Multicast frames are flooded to all ports of the VLAN. It is possible to
selectively forward only to relevant ports and filter (drop) the Multicast on the rest of the ports
by enabling the Bridge Multicast filtering status in the
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Properties page.
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