Multicast Requirements

To use multicast with SmartSockets, you must have a license for the SmartSockets Multicast feature, separate from your standard SmartSockets license. Contact your TIBCO sales representative for more information on purchasing the feature. See the TIBCO SmartSockets Installation Guide for information on adding the license to your license file.

Any RTservers that RTgms connects to must be at the same SmartSockets version level as the RTgms process. Any RTclients receiving multicast must be running with the SmartSockets Version 6.0 runtime libraries or higher. To use the multicast protocol, PGM, your network hardware, such as routers and switches, must be configured for multicast. See your network administrator about your network supporting multicast.

For a discussion of when to use multicast, instead of unicast publish-subscribe, see When Should I Use Multicast?. SmartSockets Multicast is inherently threaded and must be run on a platform that supports the SmartSockets thread model.

SmartSockets Multicast is a negative acknowledgement (NAK)-based, reliable IP multicast transport protocol for applications that require ordered or unordered, duplicate-free, multicast data delivery from multiple sources to multiple receivers.

SmartSockets Multicast provides a scalable and efficient way to simultaneously transmit large amounts of data to a group of receivers, from a single sender if need be, over existing LAN, WAN, and satellite networks. SmartSockets Multicast enables the development of new multicast applications, provides a high degree of scalability, and is geared towards network efficiency.