Multicast routing

Multicast routing is a bandwidth-conserving technology that reduces traffic by simultaneously delivering a single stream of information to thousands of corporate recipients and homes. Applications include videoconferencing, corporate communications, distance learning, and distributing software, stock quotes, and news.

Multicast routing applications and protocols

Multicast routing protocols send source traffic to multiple receivers efficiently, without adding extra load on the source or receivers, and use less network bandwidth than other technologies. Multicast packets are replicated in the network by Firewall Threat Defense device enabled with Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) and other supporting multicast protocols, which results in the most efficient delivery of data to multiple receivers possible.

The Firewall Threat Defense device supports both stub multicast routing and PIM multicast routing. However, you cannot configure both concurrently on a single Firewall Threat Defense device.

Note

The UDP and non-UDP transports are both supported for multicast routing. However, the non-UDP transport has no FastPath optimization.