Encyclopedia > Multicast

  Article Content

Multicast

Multicast is a the delivery of information to multiple destinations simultaneously. Typically used to refer to IP Multicasting, which is a protocol for efficiently sending to multiple receivers at the same time on TCP-IP networks, by use of a multicast address. It's also commonly associated with audio/video protocols such as RTP.

By comparison with multicast, conventional point-to-single-point delivery is called unicast[?].

There are two basic kinds of multicast delivery:

Modern multicast algorithms are often capable of combining and managing the two.

Multicast is not in general use in the commercial Internet, due to interoperability problems and the lack of a compelling business model for multicast.

However, some communities within the public Internet make regular use of multicast (see the MBONE[?] for an example), and multicast is used for special applications within private IP networks.

IP multicast protocols

See also:

External links



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
East Islip, New York

... 6.3% from 18 to 24, 32.3% from 25 to 44, 21.1% from 45 to 64, and 11.8% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 37 years. For every 100 females there are 95.2 ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 35.2 ms