Summary
Multicasting is an attractive alternative to unicasting or broadcasting for sending one-to-many messages across subnet boundaries. Despite the fact that multicasting is more complex than unicasting, it requires surprisingly few additions to the socket API, making multicasting applications easy to write.
The main "gotcha" with multicasting is the uneven support for multicast routing on the Internet, which limits its use to in-house applications and experimental networks like the MBONE.
Get Network Programming with Perl now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
