> Multicast is seductive to designers who ignore the realities of
> propagation and channel coding issues, because they think it works one
> way, but the reality is quite different.
Hold on.
Mulsticast is used for two distinct purposes: for broadcast-style
applications (streaming), and for discovery (ARP, ND, mDNS, and of course
the Hello beaconing of routing protocols).
For broadcast-style applications, multicast can be replaced with multiple
unicast streams, as Netflix shows, although this is best done at the
routers rather than at the senders, since this allows building a single
distribution tree without the need for application-layer proxies ("CDNs").
For discovery, multicast is unavoidable -- there's simply no way you're
going to send a unicast to a node that you haven't discovered yet.
-- Juliusz
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