Multicast

:Multicast is sometimes used to refer to a multiplexed broadcast

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Multicast is the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once and only create copies when the links to the destinations split.

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By comparison with multicast, conventional point-to-single-point delivery is called unicast. When unicast is used to deliver to several recipients, a copy of the data is sent from the sender to each recipient, resulting in inefficient and badly scalable duplication at the sending side. Many popular protocols like XMPP accept this shortcoming however, and limit the amount of possible recipients instead.

Related Topics:
Unicast - XMPP

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