Overview#
Broadcast is a method of transferring a message to all recipients simultaneously.Broadcast to unicast in which a message is sent to only a single Entity.
Network Broadcast#
Broadcast refers to transmitting a packet that the scope of the broadcast is limited to a Broadcast domain.The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the de facto standard on large computer clusters includes the MPI_Alltoall method.
The Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), 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 Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) also 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 it 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.
Broadcast is Not supported on all network technologies#
Some network technologies DO NOT support broadcast addressing; for example,More Information#
There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:- [#1] - Broadcasting_(networking)
- based on information obtained 2018-09-19