Chapter 14. IP Multicast Routing

14.1. Introduction

The previous two chapters discussed multicasting on a single network. In this chapter we look at multicasting across an entire internet. We describe the operation of the mrouted program, which computes the multicast routing tables, and the kernel functions that forward multicast datagrams between networks.

Technically, multicast packets are forwarded. In this chapter we assume that every multicast packet contains an entire datagram (i.e., there are no fragments), so we use the term datagram exclusively. Net/3 forwards IP fragments as well as IP datagrams.

Figure 14.1 shows several versions of mrouted and how they correspond to the BSD releases. The mrouted releases ...

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