IP Multicast - MBONE (1)
MBONE - Multicast backBONE
MBONE is a virtual network built on top of the Internet; Invented by Van Jacobson and Steve Casner in 1992. The purpose of MBONE is to minimize amount of data required for multipoint audio / video-conferencing
MBONE is free; it uses network of mrouters that can support multicast; enables access to real-time interactive multimedia on the Internet
Many older routers do not support multicast; to avoid this we must set up tunnels on both ends; multicast packets are encapsulated in unicast packets and sent through a tunnel;
MBONE uses a small subset of 224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255 assigned for multicast traffic. MBONE uses 224.2.0.0 for multimedia conferencing