In a multicast television application, a PC or a television with a set-top box can receive the multicast stream. Multiple set-top boxes or PCs can be connected to one subscriber port, which is a switch port configured as an MVR receiver port.
Figure 3. Multicast VLAN Registration Example. The following is an example configuration.
In this example configuration, DHCP assigns an IP address to the set-top box or the PC. When a subscriber selects a channel, the set-top box or PC sends an IGMP report to Switch A to join the appropriate multicast. If the IGMP report matches one of the configured IP multicast group addresses, the switch CPU modifies the hardware address table to include this receiver port and VLAN as a forwarding destination of the specified multicast stream when it is received from the multicast VLAN. Uplink ports that send and receive multicast data to and from the multicast VLAN are called MVR source ports.
When a subscriber changes channels or turns off the television, the set-top box sends an IGMP leave message for the multicast stream. The switch CPU sends a MAC-based general query through the receiver port VLAN. If there is another set-top box in the VLAN still subscribing to this group, that set-top box must respond within the maximum response time specified in the query. If the CPU does not receive a response, it eliminates the receiver port as a forwarding destination for this group.
Without Immediate Leave, when the switch receives an IGMP leave message from a subscriber on a receiver port, it sends out an IGMP query on that port and waits for IGMP group membership reports. If no reports are received in a configured time period, the receiver port is removed from multicast group membership. With Immediate Leave, an IGMP query is not sent from the receiver port on which the IGMP leave was received. As soon as the leave message is received, the receiver port is removed from multicast group membership, which speeds up leave latency. Enable the Immediate-Leave feature only on receiver ports to which a single receiver device is connected.
MVR eliminates the need to duplicate television-channel multicast traffic for subscribers in each VLAN. Multicast traffic for all channels is only sent around the VLAN trunk once—only on the multicast VLAN. The IGMP leave and join messages are in the VLAN to which the subscriber port is assigned. These messages dynamically register for streams of multicast traffic in the multicast VLAN on the Layer 3 device. The access layer switch, Switch A, modifies the forwarding behavior to allow the traffic to be forwarded from the multicast VLAN to the subscriber port in a different VLAN, selectively allowing traffic to cross between two VLANs.
IGMP reports are sent to the same IP multicast group address as the multicast data. The Switch A CPU must capture all IGMP join and leave messages from receiver ports and forward them to the multicast VLAN of the source (uplink) port, based on the MVR mode.