| Multicast OSPF (MOSPF) was defined as an extension to the OSPF unicast routing protocol. OSPF works by having each router in a network understand all of the available links in the network. Each OSPF router calculates routes from itself to all possible destinations. |
| MOSPF works by including multicast information in OSPF link state advertisements. An MOSPF router learns which multicast groups are active on which LANs. |
| MOSPF builds a distribution tree for each source/group pair and computes a tree for active sources sending to the group. The tree state is cached, and trees must be recomputed when a link state change occurs or when the cache times out. |