Multicast Address - 3Com E4500-24 Cli Configuration Manual

Host registration: What receivers reside on the network?
Technologies of discovering a multicast source: Which multicast source should the receivers
receive information from?
Multicast addressing mechanism: Where should the multicast source transports information?
Multicast routing: How is information transported?
IP multicast is a kind of peer-to-peer service. Based on the protocol layer sequence from bottom to top,
the multicast mechanism contains addressing mechanism, host registration, multicast routing, and
multicast application:
Addressing mechanism: Information is sent from a multicast source to a group of receivers through
multicast addresses.
Host registration: A receiving host joins and leaves a multicast group dynamically using the
membership registration mechanism.
Multicast routing: A router or switch transports packets from a multicast source to receivers by
building a multicast distribution tree with multicast routes.
Multicast application: A multicast source must support multicast applications, such as video
conferencing. The TCP/IP protocol suite must support the function of sending and receiving
multicast information.

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?
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:
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:
The membership of a group is dynamic. A host can join and leave a multicast group at any time.
A multicast group can be either permanent or temporary.
A multicast group whose addresses are assigned by IANA is a permanent multicast group. It is also
called reserved multicast group.
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