Multicast Route Overview

Multicast routing environments require the following items:

• A mechanism between hosts and routers to communicate group membership information. Security devices support the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) versions 1, 2, and 3.
• A multicast routing protocol to populate the multicast route table and forward multicast traffic to hosts throughout the network. Security devices support the Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) protocol. Alternatively, you can use IGMP proxy to transmit multicast information between routers without the CPU overhead of a multicast routing protocol

  Note: Multicast routing is only supported in ScreenOS 5.1 and later.

This topic describes the basic steps to configure the following multicast protocols:

• Configuring IGMP (NSM Procedure)
• Configuring IGMP Proxy (NSM Procedure)
• Configuring PIM Sparse Mode (NSM Procedure)

  Note: The NSM UI displays the multicast parameters and multicast static routes that you configure. It does not display dynamic information about multicast protocols at the device level. (For example, whether or not an interface is a querier in IGMP.) For this information, you must issue the appropriate CLI get commands from the device.

Related Documentation

• RIP Overview
• BGP Overview