The Wireless Multicast Forwarding provides an efficient way to forward the multicast traffic on the wireless medium and over comes the multicast transmission issues on WLAN using the repeated unicast of multicast frames.
It uses IGMP frames to keep track of participating group members and multicast packets are transmitted only to the interested members after unicast MAC conversion.
With WMF, the data transfer is more reliable as the frames are sent as unicast and robust transmission is possible as dynamic per station rate control can be done based on the link errors and noise conditions.
The multicast group members can be a STA end point Streaming between STA devices will also be supported. The multicast streaming server can be attached to any of the LAN ports.
Configuring Wireless Multicast Forwarding Settings
To configure Wireless Multicast Forwarding settings:
1. Select Wireless>Wireless Multicast Forwarding in the navigation pane.
• Wireless Multicast Forwarding—Enables or disables wireless multicast forwarding globally on the Cisco WAP571/E.
Note After new settings are saved, the corresponding processes may be stopped and restarted. When this happens, the WAP device may lose connectivity. We recommend that you change WAP device settings when a loss of connectivity will least affect your wireless clients.