About 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 that take advantage of multicast routing include videoconferencing, corporate communications, distance learning, and distribution of software, stock quotes, and news.

Multicast routing protocols deliver source traffic to multiple receivers without adding any additional burden on the source or the receivers while using the least network bandwidth of any competing technology. Multicast packets are replicated in the network by 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 threat defense device supports both stub multicast routing and PIM multicast routing. However, you cannot configure both concurrently on a single threat defense device.