Broadcasting (networking)
In
All-to-all communication is a
Addressing methods
Routing schemes |
---|
Unicast |
Broadcast |
Multicast |
Anycast |
There are four principal addressing methods in the Internet Protocol:
- Unicast delivers a message to a single specific node using a one-to-one association between a sender and destination: each destination address uniquely identifies a single receiver endpoint.
- Broadcast delivers a message to all nodes in the network using a one-to-all association; a single subnet.
- Multicast delivers a message to a group of nodes that have expressed interest in receiving the message using a one-to-many-of-many or many-to-many-of-many association; datagrams are routed simultaneously in a single transmission to many recipients. Multicast differs from broadcast in that the destination address designates a subset, not necessarily all, of the accessible nodes.
- Anycast delivers a message to any one out of a group of nodes, typically the one nearest to the source using a one-to-one-of-many[2] association where datagrams are routed to any single member of a group of potential receivers that are all identified by the same destination address. The routing algorithm selects the single receiver from the group based on which is the nearest according to some distance or cost measure.
Overview
In computer networking, broadcasting refers to transmitting a
Broadcasting is the most general communication method and is also the most intensive, in the sense that many messages may be required and many network devices are involved.
Broadcasting may be performed as all scatter in which each sender performs its own scatter in which the messages are distinct for each receiver, or all broadcast in which they are the same.[4]
The MPI message passing method which is the de facto standard on large computer clusters includes the MPI_Alltoall method.[5]
Not all network technologies support broadcast addressing; for example, neither
The successor to IPv4, IPv6 does not implement the broadcast method, so as to prevent disturbing all nodes in a network when only a few may be interested in a particular service. Instead, IPv6 relies on multicast addressing - a conceptually similar one-to-many routing methodology. However, multicasting limits the pool of receivers to those that join a specific multicast receiver group.
Both Ethernet and IPv4 use an all-ones broadcast address to indicate a broadcast packet. Token Ring uses a special value in the IEEE 802.2 control field.
Broadcasting may be abused to perform a type of DoS-attack known as a Smurf attack. The attacker sends forged ping requests with the source IP address of the victim computer, and all computers in the domain flood the victim computer with their replies.
See also
- Broadcast radiation
- Point-to-multipoint communication
- Broadcast, Unknown-Unicast and Multicast traffic
- Terminating Reliable Broadcast
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0387097657.
- ISSN 1389-1286.
- ISBN 0-13-066102-3.
- ISBN 978-1558608528.
- ISBN 3-540-44296-0.
External links
- "Network Broadcasting and Multicast". Archived from the original on 2007-10-11.