SUPPORTING IP MULTICAST ON A THUNDERSWITCH-BASED LAYER 2 SWITCH

This document describes how to support IP multicast on a Texas Instruments (TI™) ThunderSWITCH™-based layer 2 switch.

Multimedia applications for both the Internet and the enterprise network have been gaining both in popularity and deployment. Examples of these applications are news bulletins, live stock quotes, and multiparty video-conferencing, to mention a few. Traditionally, these types of multimedia applications were delivered to the end user via unicast. The server would create a point-to-point connection with each host subscribing to a particular service. Hence, the server must transmit an exact copy of each packet to every host. Not only is bandwidth wasted as the numbers of hosts subscribing to a service increases, the processing load on the server increases also.

IP multicast solves both problems. By allowing the server to only transmit one copy of the packet, the processing load for the service is minimized. The packet is routed only to those subnets that have at least one host subscribing to a particular service (member of that IP Multicast group) and hence the bandwidth of the network is utilized more efficiently.

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