Comparing Multicast to Unicast

The Junos OS routing protocol process supports a wide variety of routing protocols. These routing protocols carry network information among routers not only for unicast traffic streams sent between one pair of clients and servers, but also for multicast traffic streams containing video, audio, or both, between a single server source and many client receivers. The routing protocols used for multicast differ in many key ways from unicast routing protocols.

Information is delivered over a network by three basic methods: unicast, broadcast, and multicast.

The differences among unicast, broadcast, and multicast can be summarized as follows:

• Unicast: One-to-one, from one source to one destination.
• Broadcast: One-to-all, from one source to all possible destinations.
• Multicast: One-to-many, from one source to multiple destinations expressing an interest in receiving the traffic.

  Note: This list does not include a special category for many-to-many applications, such as online gaming or videoconferencing, where there are many sources for the same receiver and where receivers often double as sources. Many-to-many is a service model that repeatedly employs one-to-many multicast and therefore requires no unique protocol. The original multicast specification, RFC 1112, supports both the any-source multicast (ASM) many-to-many model and the source-specific multicast (SSM) one-to-many model.

With unicast traffic, many streams of IP packets that travel across networks flow from a single source, such as a Web site server, to a single destination such as a client PC. This is still the most common form of information transfer on networks.

Broadcast traffic flows from a single source to all possible destinations reachable on the network, which is usually a LAN. Broadcasting is the easiest way to make sure traffic reaches its destinations.

Television networks use broadcasting to distribute video and audio. Even if the television network is a cable television (CATV) system, the source signal reaches all possible destinations, which is the main reason that some channels' content is scrambled. Broadcasting is not feasible on the public Internet because of the enormous amount of unnecessary information that would constantly arrive at each end user's device, the complexities and impact of scrambling, and related privacy issues.

Multicast traffic lies between the extremes of unicast (one source, one destination) and broadcast (one source, all destinations). Multicast is a “one source, many destinations” method of traffic distribution, meaning only the destinations that explicitly indicate their need to receive the information from a particular source receive the traffic stream.

On an IP network, because destinations (clients) do not often communicate directly with sources (servers), the routers between source and destination must be able to determine the topology of the network from the unicast or multicast perspective to avoid routing traffic haphazardly. Multicast routers replicate packets received on one input interface and send the copies out on multiple output interfaces.

In IP multicast, the source and destination are almost always hosts and not routers. Multicast routers distribute the multicast traffic across the network from source to destinations. The multicast router must find multicast sources on the network, send out copies of packets on several interfaces, prevent routing loops, connect interested destinations with the proper source, and keep the flow of unwanted packets to a minimum. Standard multicast routing protocols provide most of these capabilities, but some router architectures cannot send multiple copies of packets and so do not support multicasting directly.