Routing TCP/IP, Volume II: CCIE Professional Development, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Introduction to IP Multicast Routing

Multicasting is the process of sending data to some group of receivers. It might be argued that unicasting and broadcasting are subsets of multicasting. For unicasting, there is only a single member of the group; for broadcasting, all possible receivers are members of the group. This chapter demonstrates why such an argument is only valid on a conceptual level; in networking, at least, distinct functional and protocol differences exist between multicasting and unicasting and broadcasting. That said, IPv6 does move a little closer to everything being a variant of multicast; instead of a broadcast address, it uses an all-nodes multicast address. The same results occur as broadcast but under the functional ...