Multicast protocols

Layer 3 multicast protocols include:
  • IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) for last-hop multicast group management. Current RFCs include:

    • IGMPv2 (RFC 2236)

    • IGMPv3 (RFC 3376)

  • PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) for intra-domain multicast routing.

    • PIM-SM (Sparse mode) (RFC 4601)

    • PIM-DM (Dense mode) (RFC 3973)

    • BSR (Bootstrap router) (RFC 5059)

  • MSDP (Multicast Source Discovery Protocol) (RFC 3618)

  • MLD (Multicast Listener Discovery) v1 and v2

    • MLD v1 - RFC 2710

    • MLD v2 - RFC 3810

Layer 2 multicast protocol:

  • IGMP snooping for IPv4 multicast filtering.

  • MLD snooping for IPv6 multicast filtering.