Multicast Overview; Information Transmission In The Unicast Mode - H3C S5100-SI Operation Manual

Ethernet switches

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Multicast Overview

With the development of the Internet, more and more interaction services such as data, voice, and

video services are running on the network. In addition, highly bandwidth- and time-critical services,

such as e-commerce, Web conferencing, online auctions, video on demand (VoD), and tele-education

have come into being. These services have higher requirements for information security, legal use of

paid services, and network bandwidth.

In the network, packets are sent in three modes: unicast, broadcast and multicast. The following

sections describe and compare data interaction processes for unicast, broadcast, and multicast traffic.

In unicast, the system establishes a separate data transmission channel for each user requiring this

information, and sends a separate copy of the information to the user, as shown in 0:

Figure 1-1 Information transmission in the unicast mode

Assume that Hosts B, D and E need this information. The source server establishes transmission

channels for the devices of these users respectively. As the transmitted traffic over the network is in

direct proportion to the number of users that receive this information, when a large number of users

need this information, the server must send many pieces of information with the same content to the

users. Therefore, the limited bandwidth becomes the bottleneck in information transmission. This

shows that unicast is not good for the transmission of a great deal of information.

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