Server Multicast - MFC CSocket - C++ - How to?

Question

I'm creating my own server using some protocols : TCP-PULL ok, TCP-PUSH ok, UDP-PULL ok (but I can't serve two clients at the same time!), UDP-PUSH ok (same problem). Now, I need to create my the last protocol : Multicast-PUSH, but I can't understand how it works and I really don't know how to code it in C++. I've read about join a group and that in multicast there's no connection, so bytes are sent even if anyone is connected.

I'm coding in C++, using MFC libraries and CSockets.

Could please someone help?

Thank's!!

Answer 1

Consider an example where one system needs to send the same information to multiple systems. How best to accomplish this? The obvious approach is to have a socket "connection" for each target system. When data is ready to be sent, the sender iterates over each "connection," transmitting the data to the target system. This iteration process has to occur every time a message is sent, and it has to be robust such that if a transmission fails for one system, it doesn't fail for the remaining systems. But the problem is really worse than that because typically all the systems in a multicast exchange which to transmit data. This means that each system has to have a "connection" to each and every system wishing to participate.

This is where multicast comes in. In multicast, the sender sends data once to a specialized IP address and port called the multicast group. From there the network equipment, e.g., routers, take care of forwarding the data to the other systems in the multicast group. To achieve this, all systems wishing to participate in the multicast exchange have to "join" the multicast group, which happens during socket initialization and is used to simply notify the network equipment that the system wishes to participate in the multicast exchange. There is a special range of IPv4 addresses used for multicast - 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. You must use an IP address within this range and a port number of your choosing in order for multicast to work correctly.

Check out the Multicast Wrapper Class at CodeProject for an example of how to do this in MFC.