Internet Group Management Protocol(IGMP) Leave a comment

The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IPv4 networks to establish multicast group memberships. IGMP is an integral part of IP multicast.

IGMP can be used for one-to-many networking applications such as online streaming video and gaming, and allows more efficient use of resources when supporting these types of applications.

IGMP is used on IPv4 networks. Multicast management on IPv6 networks is handled by Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) which uses ICMPv6 messaging in contrast to IGMP’s bare IP encapsulation.

A network designed to deliver a multicast service using IGMP might use this basic architecture:

IGMP operates between the client computer and a local multicast router. Switches featuring IGMP snooping derive useful information by observing these IGMP transactions. Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) is then used between the local and remote multicast routers, to direct multicast traffic from the multicast server to many multicast clients.

IGMP operates on the network layer, just the same as other network management protocols like ICMP.[1]

The IGMP protocol is implemented on a particular host and within a router. A host requests membership to a group through its local router while a router listens for these requests and periodically sends out subscription queries. A single router per subnet is elected to perform this querying function. Some multilayer switches include an IGMP querier capability to allow their IGMP snooping features to work in the absence of an IP multicast capability in the larger network.

IGMP is vulnerable to some attacks,[2][3][4][5] and firewalls commonly allow the user to disable it if not needed.