Broadcasting Explained
Broadcasting is an old technology that dates back to the earliest versions of TCP/IP. It is a nonselective form of the UDP protocol in which messages placed on the local subnet are received and processed by each host on the network. Because broadcasting is gregarious, it is strictly limited to the local subnet. Unless deliberately configured otherwise, routers refuse to forward broadcast packets across subnet boundaries.
Broadcasting is implemented using a special IP address known as the "broadcast address." As explained in Chapter 3, the broadcast address is an IP address whose host part is replaced by all ones. For example, for the class C network 192.168.3.124, the host part of the address is the last byte, making its ...
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