How IGMP operates

The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is an internal protocol of the Internet Protocol (IP) suite. IP manages multicast traffic by using switches, multicast routers and hosts that support IGMP. (In Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s implementation of IGMP, a multicast router is not necessary as long as a switch is configured to support IGMP with the querier feature enabled.) A set of hosts, routers or switches that send or receive multicast data streams to or from the same sources is called a multicast group and all devices in the group use the same multicast group address.