The increasing availability of WiFi Access Points that support multicast IP is facilitating the emergence of WiCast WiFi Multicast that allows the binding of data to geographical locations.

If the organization that is serving the content has control over the network between server and recipients ( i. e., educational, government, and corporate intranets ), then routing protocols such as Protocol Independent Multicast can be used to deliver stream content to multiple Local Area Network segments.

PIM ( Protocol Independent Multicast ) in conjunction with OSPF or other IGPs, ( Interior Gateway Protocol ), is widely deployed.

Multicast management on IPv6 networks is handled by Multicast Listener Discovery ( MLD ) which uses ICMPv6 messaging in contrast to IGMP's bare IP encapsulation.

Protocol Independent Multicast ( PIM ) is then used between the local and remote multicast routers, to direct multicast traffic from the multicast server to many multicast clients.

Apple's Multicast DNS ( mDNS ) is an open specification, while Microsoft's Link-local Multicast Name Resolution ( LLMNR ) is little used and the specification is not an IETF standards track publication.

Multicast DNS ( mDNS ) is a protocol that uses APIs similar to unicast Domain Name System but implemented over a multicast protocol.

Multicast delegation is a mechanism that provides functionality to execute more than one method.

The two least-significant-bits of the second nibble of the first octet of the hexadecimal representation ( i. e., the two least significant bits of the first octet ) of the OUI are reserved as flag bits for some protocols ( e. g., ' M ' bit and ' X ' bit ), flags to indicate whether the address is part of an individual ( unicast ) or group ( multicast ) address block ( e. g., Individual / Group / G bit or Unicast / Multicast / M bit ), flags to indicate whether an address is universally or locally administered ( e. g., Universal / Local / L bit ), etc., and should not contain the values 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, a, b, d, e, or f, unless these values reflect the true meaning of these flag bits – if the organization that owns the OUI does set one of these bits when creating an identifier, then the value of the second nibble of the first octet changes accordingly in representations of the OUI ( e. g., if the hexadecimal value of the second nibble of the first octet is ' C ' and the least-significant-bit is set, then the value becomes ' D ').

FAST is used for sending Multicast market data

Protocol-Independent Multicast ( PIM ) is a family of multicast routing protocols for Internet Protocol ( IP ) networks that provide one-to-many and many-to-many distribution of data over a LAN, WAN or the Internet.

It is termed protocol-independent because PIM does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other traditional routing protocols such as the Routing Information Protocol, Open Shortest Path First, Border Gateway Protocol and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol.

It is used with Source-Specific Multicast where only a single source is allowed, such as in IPTV.

Multicast was for the most part an after-thought in MPLS design.

The protocol most widely used for this is Protocol Independent Multicast ( PIM ).

Information about keepalives, global addressing, IP Multicast and the status of virtual circuits is commonly exchanged using LMI.

The limited deployment of IP Multicast, a best effort network layer multicast protocol, has led to considerable interest in alternate approaches that are implemented at the application layer, using only end-systems.

Reliable multicast protocols such as Pragmatic General Multicast ( PGM ) have been developed to add loss detection and retransmission on top of IP multicast.

* RFC 3170: IP Multicast Applications: Challenges and Solutions

* RFC 5757: Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 ( MIPv6 ): Problem Statement and Brief Survey

* IP Multicast provides a means to send a single media stream to a group of recipients on a computer network.

For routing multicast IP traffic, OSPF supports the Multicast Open Shortest Path First protocol ( MOSPF ) as defined in RFC 1584.

This version enables IP telephony ( VoIP ) by providing simple and generic methods for making connections between two ( using H. 323 ) or more ( using IP Multicast ) computers and now also offers the ability to access any media streams involved in the connection.

* Core-based trees, a proposal for making IP Multicast scalable by constructing a tree of routers

Cheshire subsequently joined Apple and authored IETF draft proposals for Multicast DNS and DNS based Service Discovery, supporting the transition from AppleTalk to IP networking.

The Corporate edition supports Unicast, Multicast and peer-to-peer transfers via TCP / IP.

* IP Multicast

The Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol ( DVMRP ), defined in RFC 1075, is used to share information between routers to facilitate the transportation of IP Multicast packets among networks.

At this IP layer, IP Multicast techniques are used for distributing the file based content.

3GP is a required file format for video and associated speech / audio media types and timed text in ETSI 3GPP technical specifications for IP Multimedia Subsystem ( IMS ), Multimedia Messaging Service ( MMS ), Multimedia Broadcast / Multicast Service ( MBMS ) and Transparent end-to-end Packet-switched Streaming Service ( PSS ).

* Multicast over TCP / IP HOWTO

Multicast addressing can be used in the Link Layer ( Layer 2 in the OSI model ), such as Ethernet multicast, and at the Internet Layer ( Layer 3 for OSI ) for Internet Protocol Version 4 ( IPv4 ) or Version 6 ( IPv6 ) multicast.

Another type of multicast could be Any-Source Multicast, but it is not so suitable for large-scale applications with huge number of users.

Academic research includes End System Multicast and Overcast for multicast ; RON ( Resilient Overlay Network ) for resilient routing ; and OverQoS for quality of service guarantees, among others.

A unicast forwarding pattern, typical of many networking technologies including the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic A multicast forwarding pattern, typical of Protocol Independent Multicast | PIM A broadcasting ( networks ) | broadcast forwarding pattern, typical of bridging ( networking ) | bridged Ethernet

* Bibliography on overlay multicast and application layer multicast for the IRTF Scalable Adaptive Multicast Research Group

Although MBGP enables the exchange of inter-domain multicast routing information, other protocols such as the Protocol Independent Multicast family are needed to build trees and forward multicast traffic.

Multicast RPF, typically denoted simply as RPF, is used in conjunction with a multicast routing protocols such as MSDP and PIM-SM to ensure loop-free forwarding of multicast packets.

Reliable multicast protocols such as Pragmatic General Multicast ( PGM ) have been developed to add loss detection and retransmission on top of IP multicast.

In 2000, Bill Manning and Bill Woodcock described the Multicast Domain Name Service which spawned the implementations by Apple and Microsoft.

A Zone Multicast Address is datalink independent group address within the AppleTalk computer network protocol suite at which a network node receives the NBP broadcasts directed to its zone.

Broadcast distribution is controlled by a Buddycast Multicast Controller ( MC ), which hands off inbound requests for streams to available buddies and monitors the state of relayed streams.

Multicast, by its very nature, is not a connection-oriented mechanism, so protocols such as TCP, which allows for retransmission of missing packets, are not appropriate.