Multicast Addresses

The concept of this Multicasting was introduced by Dr. Deering when he was working on something and he had to send some data from one PC to many other PCs, hence, it was then he read the routing protocol and realized that they can be extended and he introduced the concept of multicasting. A multicast address is a logical set of identifier for a group of hosts or users in a computer network, which are available to process the frames and the datagram intended to be multicast for a designated network service. There are two different layers of the OSI model where this multicast addressing can be used.

There are, Layer 2 of the OSI model or data link layer, and here the example of the Ethernet multicast can be quoted and layer 3 of the OSI model or more commonly known as the internet layer, here the multicast address in used by the internet protocol version 4 or IPv4 multicast and internet protocol version 6 or IPv6 multicast.

When it comes to assigning a multicast address to an application or a group of hosts, then one needs to keep in mind the range of the multicast address and this range is from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. All the applications and the networks who make use of the multicast address have to assign address to their devices within this range. The range for the IPv4 is from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. The range 224.0.0.0 to 224.0.0.255 is the part of the permanent groups and routers do not forward packets with destination addresses used from this range. 

  The range 244.0.1.0 to 224.0.1.255 is used to assign addresses to the different networking protocols. The range 232.0.0.0 to 232.255.255.255 is used for the SSM applications. The range 233.0.0.0 to 233.255.255.255 is used in the networking world to automatically allocate the 256 multicast address to any enterprise that own as registered ASN and lastly there is a range of range 239.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 which is used to assign addresses to the private applications.