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Internet Group Management Protocol
(IGMP)
On an Aggregator, IGMP snooping is auto-configured. You can display information on IGMP by using show ip igmp command.
Multicast is based on identifying many hosts by a single destination IP address. Hosts represented by the same IP address are
a multicast group. The internet group management protocol (IGMP) is a Layer 3 multicast protocol that hosts use to join or
leave a multicast group. Multicast routing protocols (such as protocol-independent multicast [PIM]) use the information in IGMP
messages to discover which groups are active and to populate the multicast routing table.
This chapter contains the following sections:
IGMP Overview
IGMP Snooping
Topics:
IGMP Overview
IGMP Version 2
IGMP Version 3
IGMP Snooping
How IGMP Snooping is Implemented on an Aggregator
Disabling Multicast Flooding
Displaying IGMP Information
IGMP Overview
IGMP has three versions. Version 3 obsoletes and is backwards-compatible with version 2; version 2 obsoletes version 1.
IGMP Version 2
IGMP version 2 improves upon version 1 by specifying IGMP Leave messages, which allows hosts to notify routers that they
no longer care about traffic for a particular group. Leave messages reduce the amount of time that the router takes to stop
forwarding traffic for a group to a subnet (leave latency) after the last host leaves the group. In version 1 hosts quietly leave
groups, and the router waits for a query response timer several times the value of the query interval to expire before it stops
forwarding traffic.
To receive multicast traffic from a particular source, a host must join the multicast group to which the source is sending traffic.
A host that is a member of a group is called a receiver. A host may join many groups, and may join or leave any group at any
time. A host joins and leaves a multicast group by sending an IGMP message to its IGMP querier. The querier is the router that
surveys a subnet for multicast receivers and processes survey responses to populate the multicast routing table.
IGMP messages are encapsulated in IP packets which is as illustrated below:
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