IP Communication
IP communication is the backbone of computer networking. As a matter of fact, every network device needs an IP address to communicate. There are few types of IP communication. Depending on needs, types of IP communication changes. In this article, we will discuss about four types of IP communications.
01. Unicast: One to One
02. Multicast: One to Many
03. Broadcast: One to All
04. Anycast: One to Closest
Before diving in deep, lets see the network diagram above. As we will use this diagram to explain four types of IP Communication, so it is important to understand it clearly. However, suppose this a scenario of a medium sized office. There are few IP phones, few servers and of course a router. Furthermore, servers work as Publisher server, Subscriber server, DNS server and Cisco Unity server.
Here we will discuss for instances to explain four types of communication.
01. Unicast: One to One
When one end device communicates with another single end device, it is called unicast.
In above diagram, suppose, DX650-1 wants to communicate with publisher server, to let the authority know that he is ready to work. So then, it will make a call to the publisher server only. This is a unicast communication. Here, DX650-1 communicates only with publisher server.
02. Multicast: One to Many
When one device communicates with more than one device, it is a muliticast communication.
For example, suppose DX650-1 has put a call on hold. As a result, other caller will hear a music stream. There is a server to stream music for every calls which are on hold. If we streams holding music differently for every call, then it will reduce the network performance. So what is done is, a servers is configured to stream hold music for all the calls which are in hold. This is a multicast communication.
03. Broadcast: One to All
When one device communicates with every devices in its network, then it ia broadcast.
One very common example of broadcast is ARP request. Suppose that DX650-2 is a newly connected device in the network. Now it want to communicate with other devices in the network. As it doesn’t know the MAC addresses of other devices, it will send an ARP request to every devices which are connected to the network. This is a broadcast message.
04. Anycast: One to CloseSt
When one device communicates with its closest device, it is called anycast communication.
Actually this is an IPv6 feature, but it can be implemented in IPv4 to. In this communication, a device communicates to its closest device to improve network performance. One good example of it is using it in DNS server. There are DNS servers all over the world with same IP address. As a result, when one device needs to know the address of a particular website, it send DNS request to closet DNS server.
These are the basic for types of communication that is usually happens in a network. If you want to more about any type of communication let us know in the comment section. Thank you all!
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