Understanding Multicast Trees: Source Trees, Shared Trees, and Variations
Multicast is a powerful communication method in computer networks that allows a single sender to efficiently deliver data to multiple interested recipients simultaneously. Unlike unicast (one-to-one) or broadcast (one-to-all on a segment), multicast conserves network bandwidth and processing resources by minimizing duplicate transmissions, replicating packets only when necessary. At the heart of this efficiency are multicast trees, which are fundamental to how multicast protocols like Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) build loop-free forwarding topologies. ...