| Term | Description |
| multicast | Multicast is a technique in which packets are simultaneously sent to multiple recipients on a network. More specifically, multicast is a mechanism for defining groups of nodes, and sending IP messages to that group, rather than to every node on the LAN (broadcast), or just a single node (unicast). It is often used to send an audio and/or video program to multiple users on a network more efficiently. The efficiency is realized by sending only one data stream from the file server, rather than one stream for each recipient. The digital data stream is duplicated as necessary in the downstream path by routers and/or switches in order to account for different signal paths to the end-users. |