• A Redundant Ethernet Network Technology
• Port Trunking / JetView / CLI / Secured Management
• IGMP Snooping
• VLAN Technology
• Network Management-SNMP/RMON

IGMP Snooping

There are 3 ways to transmit packets over a network: Unicasting, Broadcasting and Multicasting.

Unicasting is so-called one-to-one transmission.
This is also the traditional way of data being transmitted over the Internet. Data will be sent only to the specified user. If there are multiple specified users, then the data will have to be sent over the network multiple times. In doing so, it will generate a great deal of traffic and consume the network bandwidth.

Broadcasting stands for one-to-many transmission. The data will be duplicated and sent to each device connected to the switch. In doing so, it will also generate a bulk of traffic and consume the network bandwidth.

In order to efficiently use the bandwidth and cut down the traffic, multicasting is the ideal solution.
When data needs to be duplicated and sent to a big amount of users on the network, the data will be sent simultaneously to the specified users via multicasting, not to all users.

With IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol), data can be multicasted to different specified groups of users. And IGMP Snooping provides a dynamic user registration mechanism to decide whether to multicast packets or not to the specific user in the specified group. The above-mentioned mechanism can allow maximum number of the specified groups to receive multicast packets simultaneously, and prevent users that are not in the specified groups from receiving multicast packets. In doing so, the bandwidth can be used more efficiently.

Concept of IGMP Snooping

1. The switch sends a query message to the
   connected devices.
2. IGMP compliant devices respond with
   "Join" or "Leave".
3. IGMP Snooping switch edits the
   internal MAC database accordingly.
4. Multicast Data packets are properly
   being transmitted.