How to Broadcast Information ?

With UDP/IP, an application can direct a packet to be sent to one other application endpoint

Could send the same packet to multiple destinations by repeatedly calling sendto() (in C) or DatagramSocket.send() (in Java)

This approach has two disadvantages:

• Excessive network bandwidth is required because the same packet is sent over the network multiple times

• Each host must maintain an up-to-date list of all other application endpoints who are interested in its data