Multicast Forwarding

Multicast forwarding enables one-to-many information dissemination. Multicast applications are useful for dissemination of information to multiple clients, where clients do not require reception of the entire content. A typical application is a cable-TV-like service, where clients can join a channel in the middle of a transmission, and leave before it ends.

The data is sent only to relevant ports. Forwarding the data only to the relevant ports conserves bandwidth and host resources on links.

For Multicast forwarding to work across IP subnets, nodes, and routers must be Multicast-capable. A Multicast-capable node must be able to: