Multicast Transport (mcast)

A multicast transport is a peer-to-peer transport that carries reliable multicast communication among endpoints on many host computers. Multicast transports are efficient for high fan-out communication across a LAN.

Multicast transports excel at one-to-many communications.

Multicast transports use a negative acknowledgment protocol for reliable message transfer.

Multicast transports can also support one-to-one communications. For example, servers can send one-to-one replies to individual clients (that is, requestors). For configuration details, see Configuring Multicast Inbox Communication.

Multicast transports can filter messages by subscriber interest.

  • Multicast Group as Shared Communication Medium
    Multicast transport definitions can be either unitary or fragmentary. They do not require any initial connection protocol, so the determining factor is the use case.
  • Multicast Transport: Parameters Reference
    The following table describes the parameters specific to multicast transports in the configuration interface.
  • Multicast Port Ranges
    To cooperate with firewalls, you can explicitly specify ranges of ports for multicast transports to use instead of ephemeral ports.
  • Configuring Multicast Inbox Communication
    Multicast transports can carry one-to-one communication.
  • Multicast Retransmission Suppression
    The high volume of retransmission requests from chronically slow or lossy receivers can overwhelm publishing applications and even overwhelm the entire network. Receiver loss can result from faulty network hardware, oversubscribed applications, or underpowered host computers.
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