Information About IGMP Snooping
IGMP Snooping
IGMP snooping is the process of listening to IGMP network traffic between hosts and routers. It sends multicast traffic only to the interfaces that are subscribed to a particular multicast group and thus restricts flooding of multicast traffic. Switch maintains a map of the links and the associated IP multicast streams.
IGMP snooping is designed to prevent hosts on a local network from receiving traffic for a multicast group that have not explicitly joined. IGMP snooping takes place internally on switches and is not a protocol feature. Hence, it is especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as IPTV.
Cisco NCS 520 Series Routers dynamically configure layer 2 interfaces so that multicast traffic is forwarded to those interfaces only that are associated with the multicast devices. Thus, these routers use IGMP snooping to constrain the flooding of multicast traffic.
IGMP snooping requires the router to snoop on the IGMP transmissions between the host and the router to keep a track of the multicast groups and member ports. The router receives an IGMP report from a host for a particular multicast group and then adds the host port number to the forwarding table entry. The router receives an IGMP Leave signal and removes the host port from the table entry. It also periodically deletes entries if it does not receive IGMP membership reports from the multicast clients.
IGMP snooping is supported on Metro Access licenses.