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Stands for Internet Group Management Protocol
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It’s a protocol used to optimizes the performance of multicast traffic
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Multicast traffic is when a single data packet is sent to multiple destinations simultaneously.
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This is commonly used for streaming media, online gaming, and other applications where the same data needs to be sent to multiple recipients.
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IGMP is the protocol used by IP hosts to report their multicast group memberships to multicast routers.
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It allows routers to know which hosts are interested in receiving multicast traffic for specific multicast groups.
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IGMP snooping listens in on the IGMP conversation between hosts and routers.
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It examines the IGMP messages to learn which ports on the switch have hosts that are interested in receiving multicast traffic for particular
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Based on the information gathered from IGMP messages, the switch builds a multicast table, also known as a snooping table.
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This table maps the multicast group addresses to the ports on the switch where hosts interested in receiving traffic for those groups are located.
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With the multicast table in place, the switch can now intelligently forward multicast traffic only to the ports where there are interested receivers, rather than flooding it out to all ports in the broadcast domain.
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This helps reduce unnecessary network congestion and improves overall network efficiency.
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By selectively forwarding multicast traffic only to the ports where it is needed, IGMP snooping helps conserve network bandwidth and optimize the performance of multicast applications.
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