Network Traffic Types - Unicast Broadcast Multicast Anycast - Transmission Types

In this article will demonstrate on the differences between the network traffic types and when they can be used. There are four network traffic types or transmission types: unicast, multicast, broadcast, and anycast.

Unicast: sending the packet from single source device to single destination device(one-to-one). For example  the client with an ip address 192.168.10.2 wants to ping to a single destination address 192.168.10.3, this is called unicast transmission.
broadcast: sending the packet from one device to all devices. Broadcasts are used in IPv4 networks, but not in IPv6 networks. There are two types of broadcast, limited and directed.

Limited broadcast: in limited broadcast, the broadcast address 255.255.255.255 is used as a destination address, the broadcast packet will be sent to all devices in the network segment, but this type of broadcast cannot be forwarded by the routers to another subnet. for example this type of broadcast is used in arp. the figure below illustrates an example of broadcast transmission.

Directed broadcast or Subnet Broadcast: in directed broadcast, if you have a network 192.168.10.0/24, the broadcast address of this network is 192.168.10.255. The sender of the broadcast packet will use the broadcast address 192.168.10.255 as a destination address. So, this broadcast packet will be sent to all devices in the subnet 192.168.10.0/24. Also, this type of broadcast transmission can be forwarded by the routers, so, if the sender of the broadcast packet is from a network different than the destination network, this packet broadcast transmission will be sent to the router that is directly connected to the destination, and this router will forward this broadcast to the destination network if the ip directed-broadcast feature is enabled on the router. For example, this type of broadcast can be used if you send WOL (Wake-On-Lan) broadcast packets from different network to certain destination network.
Multicast: traffic travels from a single host to multiple hosts not all hosts. What makes this possible in IPv4 networks is the use of a Class D address. A Class D address, such as 239.1.2.3, represents the address of a multicast group. Look at the diagram below, the video server

could, in this example, send a single copy of each video stream packet destined for

239.1.2.3. Devices wanting to receive the video stream can join the multicast group. In IPv6 networks, multicast addresses have a prefix of ff00::/8.

Anycast: is used in ipv6 only. when using  anycast, a single IPv6 address is assigned to multiple devices, and when sending a packet to that address, the packet will be sent to one the nearest device - means it will be sent to one of these devices that have the same ipv6 address. The nearest device is determined by the router routing table. Look at the diagram below, a client with an IPv6 address of 2100::1 wants to send traffic to a destination IPv6 address of 2200::1. Notice that two servers (Server A and Server B) have an IPv6 address of 2200::1, the traffic destined for 2200::1 is sent to Server A through Router R2, because the network on which Server A resides appears to be closer than the network on which Server B resides, from the perspective of Router R1’s IPv6 routing table (the closer is determined based on the metric or the cost value).

For more details,watch this simple and short videounicast multicast broadcast anycast

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