Multicasting is used to support real-time applications such as video conferencing or streaming audio. A multicast server does not have to establish a separate connection with each client. It merely broadcasts its service to the network, and any hosts that want to receive the multicast register with their local multicast switch/router. Although this approach reduces the network overhead required by a multicast server, the broadcast traffic must be carefully pruned at every multicast switch/router it passes through to ensure that traffic is only passed on the hosts which subscribed to this service.
This switch uses IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) to query for any attached hosts that want to receive a specific multicast service. The switch looks up the IP Multicast Group used for the service and adds any port, which received a similar request, to that group. It then propagates the service request on to any neighboring multicast switch/router to ensure that it will continue to receive the multicast service.
The Multicast Support menu contains links to the following pages: