Dell PowerConnect 8100 CLI Reference Guide - Page 467

18 IGMP Snooping Commands Snooping of Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) messages is a feature that allows PowerConnect switches to forward multicast traffic intelligently on the switch. Multicast traffic is traffic that is destined to a host group. Host groups are identified by the destination MAC address, i.e. the range 01:00:5e:00:00:00-01:00:5e:7f:ff:ff:ff for IPv4 multicast traffic or 33:33:xx:xx:xx:xx for IPv6 multicast traffic. Based on the IGMP query and report messages, the switch forwards traffic only to the ports that request the multicast traffic. This prevents the switch from broadcasting the traffic to all ports and possibly affecting network performance. IGMP snooping switches build forwarding lists by monitoring for, and in some cases intercepting, IGMP messages. Although the software processing the IGMP messages could maintain state information based on the full IP group addresses, the forwarding tables in PowerConnect are mapped to link layer addresses. The Multicast Forwarding Database (MFDB) manages the forwarding address table for Layer 2 multicast protocols, such as IGMP Snooping. The IGMP Snooping code in the CPU ages out IGMP entries in the MFDB. If a report for a particular group on a particular interface is not received within a certain time interval (query interval), the IGMP Snooping code deletes that interface from the group. The value for query interval time is configurable using management. If an IGMP Leave Group message is received on an interface, the IGMP Snooping code sends a query on that interface and waits a specified length of time (maximum response time). If no response is received within that time, that interface is removed from the group. The value for maximum response time is configurable using management. In addition to building and maintaining lists of multicast group memberships, the snooping switch also maintains a list of multicast routers. When forwarding multicast packets, they should be forwarded on ports that have joined using IGMP and also on ports on which multicast routers are attached. The reason for this is that in IGMP there is only one active query mechanism. This means that all other routers on the network are suppressed IGMP Snooping Commands 467