Internet Group Management Protocol

The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) allows an IPv4 system to communicate IP multicast group membership information to its neighboring routers. The routers, in turn, limit the multicast of IP packets with multicast destination addresses to only those interfaces on the router that are identified as IP multicast group members.

In IGMPv2, when a router sends a query to the interfaces, the clients on the interfaces respond with a membership report of multicast groups to the router. The router can then send traffic to these groups, regardless of the traffic source. When an interface no longer needs to receive traffic from a group, it sends a leave message to the router, which in turn sends a group-specific query to that interface to see if any other clients on the same interface are still active.

In contrast, IGMPv3 provides selective filtering of traffic based on the traffic source. A router running IGMPv3 sends queries to every multicast-enabled interface at the specified interval. These general queries determine if any interface wants to receive traffic from the router.

There are different types of query messages.

• General Query: Sent by a multicast router to learn the complete multicast reception state of the neighboring interfaces. In this query, both the Group Address field and the Number of Sources (N) field are zero.
• Group-Specific Query: Sent by a multicast router to learn the reception state, with respect to one multicast address, of the neighboring interfaces. In this query, the Group Address field contains the multicast address of interest, and the Number of Sources (N) field contains zero.
• Group-and-Source-Specific Query: Sent by a multicast router to learn whether neighboring interfaces want to receive packets sent to a specified multicast address, from any of a specified list of sources. In this query, the Group Address field contains the multicast address of interest, and the Source Address fields contain the source addresses of interest.

Interfaces respond to these queries by sending a membership report that contains one or more of the following records that are associated with a specific group.

• The current-state record indicates from which sources the interface wants to receive and not receive traffic. The record contains the source address of the interfaces and whether traffic will be received or included (IS_IN) or not received or excluded (IS_EX) from that source.
• The filter-mode-change record indicates that if the interface changes its current state from IS_IN to IS_EX, a TO_EX record is included in the membership report. Likewise, if the interface changes its current status from IS_EX to IS_IN, a TO_IN record appears in the membership report.
• The IGMPv2 Leave report is equivalent to a TO_IN (empty) record in IGMPv3. This record indicates that no traffic from this group will be received regardless of the source.
• The IGMPv2 group report is equivalent to an IS_EX (empty) record in IGMPv3. This record indicates that all traffic from this group will be received regardless of the source.
• The source-list-change record indicates that if the interface wants to add or remove traffic sources from its membership report, the membership report can have an ALLOW record, which contains a list of new sources from which the interface wishes to receive traffic. It can also contain a BLOCK record, which lists current traffic sources from which the interface wants to stop receiving traffic.

In response to membership reports from the interfaces, the router sends a Group-Specific Query or a Group-and-Source Specific Query to the multicast interfaces. For example, a router receives a membership report with a source-list-change record to block old sources from an interface. The router sends Group-and-Source Specific Queries to the source-group pair (S,G) identified in the record. If none of the interfaces is interested in the (S,G), it is removed from the (S,G) list for that interface on the router.

Each IGMPv3-enabled router maintains a record of the state of each group and each physical port in a virtual routing interface. This record contains the group, group-timer, filter mode, and source records information for the group or interface. Source records contain information about the source address of the packet and source timer. If the source timer expires when the state of the group or interface is in include mode, the record is removed.