IP Multicasting
The great bulk of TCP/IP communications uses IP to send messages from one source device to one recipient device, in a process called unicast communication. This is the type of messaging we normally use TCP/IP for, so when you use the Internet, you are using unicast for pretty much everything.
IP does, however, also support the ability to have one device send a message to a set of recipients. This is called multicasting. IP multicasting has been officially supported since IPv4 was first defined, but has not seen widespread use over the years, due largely to lack of support for multicasting in many hardware devices. Interest in multicasting has increased in recent years, and support for multicasting was made a standard part of the ...
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