Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP)- Protocol tutorial

Published by: Alex George
Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is used to exchange membership status information between IP routers that support multicasting. It is a is a communications protocol used to manage the membership of Internet Protocol multicast groups.

Uses of Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP)




1. IGMP can be used for online streaming video and gaming.


Implementation of IGMP


The IGMP protocol is implemented as a host side and a router side. A host side reports its membership of a group to its local router, and a router side listens to reports from hosts and periodically sends out queries.


Versions of IGMP


There are three versions of IGMP. They are :


1. IGMP v1
2. IGMP v2
3. IGMP v3

IGMPv2 allows group membership termination to be quickly reported to the routing protocol than IGMPv1, which is important for high-bandwidth multicast groups and/or subnets with highly volatile group membership. Multicast routers use IGMPv2 to learn which groups have members on each of their attached physical networks. IGMP v3 is an upgrade to IGMP v2.

IGMP snooping



IGMP snooping is the process of listening to IGMP network traffic. It prevents a networking host from accessing multicast traffic for a group where it is not joined. So we can make sure that the device is not wasting its bandwidth for unwanted traffic. IGMP snooping is of two kinds. They are:

1. Active IGMP snooping
2. Passive IGMP snooping



Suggested Readings


1. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)

2. Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)

3. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)

4. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

5. More reading on IGMP

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1 Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI)
2Network Layer
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Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)
Routing Information Protocol (RIP)
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)
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