Frenchy

i work on a prog and i would create multicast communication

one host and few client.. i am newby in the IP communication..have you a sample of prog to explain the way to create that..?

maybe multicast is not the better solution..

thanks for your help

kurifu

Multicast is a very interesting technology, and I do wish there was a lot more support for it since it would (in theory, and seemingly practicality) reduce the amount of uneeded bandwidth higher up and a traceroute for certain services likes streaming radio, and video.

Actually you could really stream from a single computer to a gateway router with a line that can carry enough bandwidth for one connection... the implications of this technology would be very usefull.

Though I am not 100% sure of the API calls you need to make (since it also depends on if you are using Berkerly style or WinSocks style sockets) I can give you a brief overview of Multicast.

You create a multicast group on your server, this group will be responsible for streaming data, you create this like youwould create a normal socket for sending a stream of data only somewhere along the way there is a flag you would set to enable multi-cast. From this point you would allow other sockets (when picked off your listening socket) into the group by joining them into the group, and when they leave you would remove them from the group. That is the basic priniciple of how it works. http://msnd.microsoft.com probably has information on that protocol.

HOWEVER, chances are you are not going to get the protocol to work. Multicast support has to be specifically enabled to work on a LAN, and plain out does not work over the internet. Even if you ISP for some strange reason had multicast enabled, you would likely not be able to cast beyond your immediate WAN subnet.

You might be better off simulating a multicast system if you need a multi-server design, where you broadcast to one server and manage connections on each of those servers (a bit of distributed networking and computing there for you--this type of set up is no easy task to conquer).

Perhaps a UDP based start-topology would be a better solution? Or maybe something like Bit-Torrent's network topology (what is that called.. star-ring? It is certainly not a complete graph, that much I know, but resembles a bit of star and a bit of ring topology). Of course this all depends on what you are trying to do.

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