One-to-Many Communications Solution

The majority of network communications employ a one-to-one, or unicast transmission model, where data is sent point-to-point from one sender to one receiver. Using this method, sending a message to 1,000 different people requires the transmission of 1,000 separate copies of the same message over the network, causing scalability and congestion problems. As the number of network users continues to grow, and as content becomes increasingly media-rich, enterprises are faced with rapidly escalating data distribution costs and bandwidth requirements just to maintain existing service levels.

IP multicast, an efficient way of delivering one-to-many communications, addresses these issues by enabling a single sender to simultaneously stream large amounts of data to many receivers and do so effectively in real time. Instead of sending 1,000 messages to reach 1,000 people, only one message need be sent. The efficiencies and cost-savings are enormous. Multicast also facilitates one-to-many applications that are impractical with unicast applications such as video and audio conferencing, employee communications, live Web transmissions of multimedia training, and multi-user games.

Raw IP multicast, although efficient, lacks a reliability layer. SmartSockets Multicast provides that reliability. SmartSockets Multicast enables simplified, highly reliable and scalable one-to-many data multicasting over terrestrial and satellite networks using the industry standard Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) protocol.