Addressing
There are four forms of IP addressing, each with its own unique properties.
- Unicast: The most common concept of an IP address is a unicast address. It normally refers to a single sender or a single receiver.
- Broadcast: Sending data to all possible destinations. For example, to send to all addresses within a network with the prefix 192.0.2, the directed broadcast IP address is 192.0.2.255.
- Multicast: A multicast address is associated with a group of interested receivers. According to RFC 3171, addresses 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 are designated as multicast addresses. Routers take care of making copies of datagrams and sending them to all receivers that have registered their interest in receiving targeted data.
- Anycast: Like broadcast and multicast, anycast is a one-to-many routing topology. However, the data stream is not transmitted to all receivers, just the one which the router decides is the "closest" in the network. Anycast is useful for balancing data loads. It is used in DNS and UDP.
Read more about this topic: SMART Multicast
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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