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Cisco 220 Series Smart Switches Administration Guide Release 1.1.0.x 164
Multicast Forwarding
This chapter describes the Multicast forwarding feature and includes the following 
topics:
• Multicast Forwarding
• Configuring Multicast Properties
• Configuring IP Multicast Group Addresses
• Configuring IGMP Snooping
• Configuring MLD Snooping
• Querying IGMP/MLD IP Multicast Groups
• Configuring Multicast Router Ports
• Configuring Forward All Multicast
• Configuring Maximum IGMP and MLD Groups
• Configuring Multicast Filtering
Multicast Forwarding
Multicast forwarding enables one-to-many information dissemination. Multicast 
applications are useful for dissemination of information to multiple clients, where 
clients do not require reception of the entire content. A typical application is a 
Cable-TV like service, where clients can join a channel in the middle of a 
transmission, and leave before it ends. 
The data is sent only to relevant ports. Forwarding the data only to the relevant 
ports conserves bandwidth and host resources on links.
For Multicast forwarding to work across IP subnets, nodes, and routers must be 
Multicast-capable. A Multicast-capable node must be able to: