Broadcasting (networking)

Last updated August 10, 2023

In computer networking, telecommunication and information theory, broadcasting is a method of transferring a message to all recipients simultaneously. Broadcasting can be performed as a high-level operation in a program, for example, broadcasting in Message Passing Interface, or it may be a low-level networking operation, for example broadcasting on Ethernet.

All-to-all communication is a computer communication method in which each sender transmits messages to all receivers within a group.^[1] In networking this can be accomplished using broadcast or multicast. This is in contrast with the point-to-point method in which each sender communicates with one receiver.

Addressing methods

Routing schemes
Unicast
Broadcast
Multicast
Anycast

There are four principal addressing methods in the Internet Protocol:

Unicast delivers a message to a single specific node using a one-to-one association between a sender and destination: each destination address uniquely identifies a single receiver endpoint.
Broadcast delivers a message to all nodes in the network using a one-to-all association; a single datagram (or packet) from one sender is routed to all of the possibly multiple endpoints associated with the broadcast address. The network automatically replicates datagrams as needed to reach all the recipients within the scope of the broadcast, which is generally an entire network subnet.
Multicast delivers a message to a group of nodes that have expressed interest in receiving the message using a one-to-many-of-many or many-to-many-of-many association; datagrams are routed simultaneously in a single transmission to many recipients. Multicast differs from broadcast in that the destination address designates a subset, not necessarily all, of the accessible nodes.
Anycast delivers a message to any one out of a group of nodes, typically the one nearest to the source using a one-to-one-of-many^[2] association where datagrams are routed to any single member of a group of potential receivers that are all identified by the same destination address. The routing algorithm selects the single receiver from the group based on which is the nearest according to some distance or cost measure.

Overview

In computer networking, broadcasting refers to transmitting a packet that will be received by every device on the network.^[3] In practice, the scope of the broadcast is limited to a broadcast domain.

Broadcasting is the most general communication method and is also the most intensive, in the sense that many messages may be required and many network devices are involved.^[1] This is in contrast to unicast addressing in which a host sends datagrams to another single host, identified by a unique address.

Broadcasting may be performed as all scatter in which each sender performs its own scatter in which the messages are distinct for each receiver, or all broadcast in which they are the same.^[4]

The MPI message passing method which is the de facto standard on large computer clusters includes the MPI_Alltoall method.^[5]

Not all network technologies support broadcast addressing; for example, neither X.25 nor Frame Relay have broadcast capability. The Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), which is the primary networking protocol in use today on the Internet and all networks connected to it, supports broadcast, but the broadcast domain is the broadcasting host's subnet, which is typically small; there is no way to do an Internet-wide broadcast. Broadcasting is largely confined to local area network (LAN) technologies, most notably Ethernet and Token Ring, where the performance impact of broadcasting is not as large as it would be in a wide area network.

The successor to IPv4, IPv6 does not implement the broadcast method, so as to prevent disturbing all nodes in a network when only a few may be interested in a particular service. Instead, IPv6 relies on multicast addressing - a conceptually similar one-to-many routing methodology. However, multicasting limits the pool of receivers to those that join a specific multicast receiver group.

Both Ethernet and IPv4 use an all-ones broadcast address to indicate a broadcast packet. Token Ring uses a special value in the IEEE 802.2 control field.

Broadcasting may be abused to perform a type of DoS-attack known as a Smurf attack. The attacker sends forged ping requests with the source IP address of the victim computer, and all computers in the domain flood the victim computer with their replies.

Related Research Articles

An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing.

IEEE 802.2 is the original name of the ISO/IEC 8802-2 standard which defines logical link control (LLC) as the upper portion of the data link layer of the OSI Model. The original standard developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in collaboration with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1998, but it remains an integral part of the family of IEEE 802 standards for local and metropolitan networks.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version deployed for production on SATNET in 1982 and on the ARPANET in January 1983. It is still used to route most Internet traffic today, even with the ongoing deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), its successor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multicast</span> Computer networking technique for transmission from one sender to multiple receivers

In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with physical layer point-to-multipoint communication.

Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and computer networks, such as the Internet.

In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Within an IP network, UDP does not require prior communication to set up communication channels or data paths.

A multicast address is a logical identifier for a group of hosts in a computer network that are available to process datagrams or frames intended to be multicast for a designated network service. Multicast addressing can be used in the link layer, such as Ethernet multicast, and at the internet layer for Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) or Version 6 (IPv6) multicast.

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a communication protocol used for discovering the link layer address, such as a MAC address, associated with a given internet layer address, typically an IPv4 address. This mapping is a critical function in the Internet protocol suite. ARP was defined in 1982 by RFC 826, which is Internet Standard STD 37.

A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting.

A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

The Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) is a computer networking protocol used in Internet Protocol networks to automatically assign an IP address to network devices from a configuration server. The BOOTP was originally defined in RFC 951 published in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anycast</span> Network addressing and routing methodology

Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops. Anycast routing is widely used by content delivery networks such as web and DNS hosts, to bring their content closer to end users.

A broadcast address is a network address used to transmit to all devices connected to a multiple-access communications network. A message sent to a broadcast address may be received by all network-attached hosts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unicast</span> Sending a message to one computer; on a one-to-one basis

In computer networking, unicast is a one-to-one transmission from one point in the network to another point; that is, one sender and one receiver, each identified by a network address.

In computer networking, the multicast DNS (mDNS) protocol resolves hostnames to IP addresses within small networks that do not include a local name server. It is a zero-configuration service, using essentially the same programming interfaces, packet formats and operating semantics as unicast Domain Name System (DNS). It was designed to work as either a stand-alone protocol or compatibly with standard DNS servers. It uses IP multicast User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, and is implemented by the Apple Bonjour and open source Avahi software packages, included in most Linux distributions. Although the Windows 10 implementation was limited to discovering networked printers, subsequent releases resolved hostnames as well. mDNS can work in conjunction with DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), a companion zero-configuration networking technique specified separately in RFC 6763.

IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is the IP-specific form of multicast and is used for streaming media and other network applications. It uses specially reserved multicast address blocks in IPv4 and IPv6.

Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) is an Inter-process communication (IPC) service in Linux designed for cluster-wide operation. It is sometimes presented as Cluster Domain Sockets, in contrast to the well-known Unix Domain Socket service; the latter working only on a single kernel.

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection." RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection." Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval." Packet flow temporal efficiency can be affected by one-way delay (OWD) that is described as a combination of the following components:

An Internet Protocol Version 6 address is a numeric label that is used to identify and locate a network interface of a computer or a network node participating in a computer network using IPv6. IP addresses are included in the packet header to indicate the source and the destination of each packet. The IP address of the destination is used to make decisions about routing IP packets to other networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multicast routing</span> Computer networking protocol for forwarding transmissions from one sender to multiple receivers

Multicast routing is one of the routing protocols in IP networking.

References

1 2 David Padua (2011). Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Vol. 4. p. 43. ISBN 978-0387097657.
↑ Goścień, Róża; Walkowiak, Krzysztof; Klinkowski, Mirosław (2015-03-14). "Tabu search algorithm for routing, modulation and spectrum allocation in elastic optical network with anycast and unicast traffic". Computer Networks. 79: 148–165. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2014.12.004. ISSN 1389-1286.
↑ Andrew Tanenbaum (2003). Computer Networks . Prentice Hall. p. 368. ISBN 0-13-066102-3.
↑ J. Duato; Sudhakar Yalamanchili; Lionel Ni (2012). Interconnection Networks. pp. 210–211. ISBN 978-1558608528.
↑ Jesper Larsson Träff (2002). Improved MPI All-to-all Communication on a Giganet SMP Cluster. Proceedings of the 9th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. pp. 392–400. ISBN 3-540-44296-0.

External links

"Network Broadcasting and Multicast". Archived from the original on 2007-10-11.

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[Padua-1] 1 2 David Padua (2011). Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Vol. 4. p. 43. ISBN 978-0387097657.

[2] Goścień, Róża; Walkowiak, Krzysztof; Klinkowski, Mirosław (2015-03-14). "Tabu search algorithm for routing, modulation and spectrum allocation in elastic optical network with anycast and unicast traffic". Computer Networks. 79: 148–165. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2014.12.004. ISSN 1389-1286.

[:0-3] Andrew Tanenbaum (2003). Computer Networks . Prentice Hall. p. 368. ISBN 0-13-066102-3.

[4] J. Duato; Sudhakar Yalamanchili; Lionel Ni (2012). Interconnection Networks. pp. 210–211. ISBN 978-1558608528.

[5] Jesper Larsson Träff (2002). Improved MPI All-to-all Communication on a Giganet SMP Cluster. Proceedings of the 9th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. pp. 392–400. ISBN 3-540-44296-0.

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