Overview of IP multicasting

Multicast protocols allow a group or channel to be accessed over different networks by multiple stations (clients) for the receipt and transmission of multicast data.

Distribution of stock quotes, video transmissions such as news services and remote classrooms, and video conferencing are all examples of applications that use multicast routing.

Brocade devices support the Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) protocol, along with the Internet Group Membership Protocol (IGMP).

PIM is a broadcast and pruning multicast protocol that delivers IP multicast datagrams. This protocol employs reverse path lookup check and pruning to allow source-specific multicast delivery trees to reach all group members. PIM builds a different multicast tree for each source and destination host group.