IP Multicasting - Beta VersionToday, the Internet and corporate intranets are being used to communicate the same information to large numbers of people. IP multicasting, a technology for efficiently sending and receiving information from a group of hosts, rather than through the more traditional one-on-one interactions, creates a single stream of data to which users subscribe. This allows a few server streams to serve much larger numbers of users. IP Multicast reduces bandwidth demands by carrying only one instance of the data to multiple destinations.
IP multicast is based on Class D IP addresses where a single address points to multiple users or group members. IP multicasting hands a file off only once to each router, which passes it on to the computers that subscribe to the information. The traditional unicast model sends separate copies of the same data to each user.
IP multicast relies on the existence of an underlying multicast delivery system to forward data from a sender to all the intended receivers. Until all the routers on the Internet are multicast-enabled, multicast through the Internet will be limited to tunneling, services offered by multicast-enabled islands, and some Internet service providers. In the meantime, however, it is possible to deploy IP multicast using a private virtual network based on a network architecture or network service that is multicast-enabled.
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