Overview
This overview describes IP multicasting and Internet Group Management
Protocol (IGMP). The overview then explains how the ProCurve Secure
Router can support multicasting by running either Protocol Independent
Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM), which is a multicast routing protocol, or
IGMP proxy.
This chapter focuses on configuring IGMP proxy for multicast stub routing. A
router uses multicast stub routing to forward multicast traffic received from
a remote source to directly connected hosts.
Generally, ProCurve Networking recommends that you use PIM-SM as this
protocol is usually as simple to configure as IGMP proxy and it provides more
capabilities. You must configure PIM-SM on you ProCurve Secure Router
instead of IGMP proxy if:
the router may receive multicasts through more than one WAN connection
the router must transit multicast traffic towards devices running a multi-
cast routing protocol
your LAN includes a multicast source, from which your router may need
to forward traffic
For information on configuring PIM-SM, you should see Chapter 11: Config-
uring Multicast Support with PIM-SM. You can refer to this chapter for
information on IGMP, which is automatically enabled when you configure
either IGMP proxy or PIM-SM, and for information on configuring IGMP
parameters.
Multicast Applications
Many emerging applications rely on delivering the same information to many
hosts. LAN TV, video conferencing, collaborative computing, and desktop
conferencing all involve transmitting a great deal of information from a source,
or many sources, to many hosts. Email systems can more efficiently deliver
mail to multiple servers simultaneously rather than one by one. Increasingly,
such technologies are turning from delivering information through multiple
point-to-point sessions to delivering it through multipoint communication.
Configuring Multicast Support for a Stub Network
Overview
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