Overview

Most campus networks today support intranet applications that operate between one sender and one receiver. However, this paradigm is rapidly changing. In the emerging campus network, there is a demand for intranet and multimedia applications where one sender will transmit to a group of receivers simultaneously. These types of applications include transmitting a corporate message to employees, video and audio broadcasting, interactive video distance learning, transmitting data from a centralized data warehouse to multiple departments, communication of stock quotes to brokers, and collaborative computing. Another example might be an internal technical support facility that uses multicast file transfer software to send software updates to multiple users in the campus simultaneously in one stream of data.

This chapter includes the following topics:

  • Multicast Overview
  • Addressing in an IP Multicast Environment
  • Managing Multicast Traffic in a Campus Environment
  • Routing Multicast Traffic
  • Multicast Routing Protocols