Chapter 17: Multicast; Multicast Forwarding - Cisco Small Business 200 Series Administration Manual

Multicast
This section describes the Multicast Forwarding feature, and covers the following topics:
•

Multicast Forwarding

• Multicast Properties
• MAC Group Address
• IP Multicast Group Addresses
• IPv4 Multicast Configuration
• IPv6 Multicast Configuration
• IGMP/MLD Snooping IP Multicast Group
• Multicast Router Ports
• Forward All
• Unregistered Multicast
Multicast Forwarding
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 Multicast > Properties page.
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