Information About IGMP Snooping
IGMP Snooping
Multicast traffic becomes flooded because a device usually learns MAC addresses by looking into the source address field of all the frames that it receives. A multicast MAC address is never used as the source address for a packet. Such addresses do not appear in the MAC address table, and the device has no method for learning them.
IP Multicast Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), which runs at Layer 3 on a multicast device, generates Layer 3 IGMP queries in subnets where the multicast traffic must be routed. IGMP (on a device) sends out periodic general IGMP queries.
IGMP Snooping is an Ethernet Virtual Circuit (EVC)-based feature set. EVC decouples the concept of VLAN and broadcast domain. An EVC is an end-to-end representation of a single instance of a Layer 2 service being offered by a provider. In the Cisco EVC framework, bridge domains are made up of one or more Layer 2 interfaces known as service instances. A service instance is the instantiation of an EVC on a given port on a given device. A service instance is associated with a bridge domain based on the configuration.
Traditionally, a VLAN is a broadcast domain, and physical ports are assigned to VLANs as access ports; the VLAN tag in a packet received by a trunk port is the same number as the internal VLAN broadcast domain. With EVC, an Ethernet Flow Point (EFP) is configured and associated with a broadcast domain. The VLAN tag is used to identify the EFP only and is no longer used to identify the broadcast domain.
When you enable EVC-based IGMP snooping on a bridge domain, the bridge domain interface responds at Layer 2 to the IGMP queries with only one IGMP join request per Layer 2 multicast group. Each bridge domain represents a Layer 2 broadcast domain. The bridge domain interface creates one entry per subnet in the Layer 2 forwarding table for each Layer 2 multicast group from which it receives an IGMP join request. All hosts interested in this multicast traffic send IGMP join requests and are added to the forwarding table entry. During a Layer 2 lookup on a bridge domain to which the bridge domain interface belongs, the bridge domain forwards the packets to the correct EFP. When the bridge domain interface hears the IGMP Leave group message from a host, it removes the table entry of the host.
Layer 2 multicast groups learned through IGMP snooping are dynamic. However, you can statically configure Layer 2 multicast groups. If you specify group membership for a multicast group address statically, your static setting supersedes any automatic manipulation by IGMP snooping. Multicast group membership lists can consist of both user-defined and IGMP snooping-learned-settings.
Restrictions for IGMP Snooping
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IGMP snooping is only supported on a Bridge Domain when OTV is enabled on ASR 1000 routers.
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If IGMP snooping is configured on a Bridge Domain with OTV enabled, then the IGMP snooping process limits the multicast traffic. In this scenario, the snooping tables are populated.
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If IGMP snooping is configured on a Bridge Domain without OTV, the IGMP snooping process does not limit multicast traffic. In this scenario, the snooping tables are not populated and the multicast traffic floods the entire VLAN.