12.1 Introduction

We mentioned in Chapter 1 that there are three kinds of IP addresses: unicast, broadcast, and multicast. In this chapter we discuss broadcasting and multicasting in more detail.

Broadcasting and multicasting only apply to UDP, where it makes sense for an application to send a single message to multiple recipients. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that implies a connection between two hosts (specified by IP addresses) and one process on each host (specified by port numbers ).

Consider a set of hosts on a shared network such as an Ethernet. Each Ethernet frame contains the source and destination Ethernet addresses (48-bit values). Normally each Ethernet frame is destined for a single host. The destination address specifies a single interface ” called a unicast. In this way communication between any two hosts doesn't bother any of the remaining hosts on the cable (except for possible contention for the shared media).

There are times, however, when a host wants to send a frame to every other host on the cable ” called a broadcast. We saw this with ARP and RARP. Multicasting fits between unicasting and broadcasting: the frame should be delivered to a set of hosts that belong to a multicast group .

To understand broadcasting and multicasting we need to understand that filtering takes place on each host, each time a frame passes by on the cable. Figure 12.1 shows a picture of this.

Figure 12.1. Filtering that takes place up the protocol stack when a frame is received.

First, the interface card sees every frame that passes by on the cable and makes a decision whether to receive the frame and deliver it to the device driver. Normally the interface card receives only those frames whose destination address is either the hardware address of the interface or the broadcast address. Additionally, most interfaces can be placed into a promiscuous mode whereby they receive a copy of every frame. This mode is used by tcpdump, for example.

Today most interfaces can also be configured to receive frames whose destination address is a multicast address, or some subset of multicast addresses. On an Ethernet, a multicast address has the low-order bit of the high-order byte turned on. In hexadecimal this bit looks like 01:00:00:00:00:00. (We can consider the Ethernet broadcast address, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff as a special case of the Ethernet multicast address.)

If the interface card receives the frame, it is passed to the device driver. (One reason the interface card might discard the frame is if the Ethernet checksum is incorrect.) Additional filtering is performed by the device driver. First, the frame type must specify a protocol that is supported (IP, ARP, etc.). Second, additional multicast filtering may be performed, to check whether the host belongs to the addressed multicast group.

The device driver then passes the frame to the next layer, such as IP, if the frame type specifies an IP datagram. IP performs more filtering, based on the source and destination IP addresses, and passes the datagram up to the next layer (such as TCP or UDP) if all is well.

Each time UDP receives a datagram from IP, it performs filtering based on the destination port number, and sometimes the source port number too. If no process is currently using the destination port number, the datagram is discarded and an ICMP port unreachable message is normally generated. (TCP performs similar filtering based on its port numbers.) If the UDP datagram has a checksum error, UDP silently discards it.

The problem with broadcasting is the processing load that it places on hosts that aren't interested in the broadcasts. Consider an application that is designed to use UDP broadcasts. If there are 50 hosts on the cable, but only 20 are participating in the application, every time one of the 20 sends a UDP broadcast, the other 30 hosts have to process the broadcast, all the way up through the UDP layer, before the UDP datagram is discarded. The UDP datagram is discarded by these 30 hosts because the destination port number is not in use.

The intent of multicasting is to reduce this load on hosts with no interest in the application. With multicasting a host specifically joins one or more multicast groups. If possible, the interface card is told which multicast groups the host belongs to, and only those multicast frames are received.