This lesson discusses the most common issues encountered with IP multicast using PIM Dense mode. Along the way, we introduce some of the multicast-specific troubleshooting tools available on Cisco IOS-XE devices.

This lesson walks through some PIM basics using real configuration examples. Along the way, we introduce some important concepts regarding multicast on Cisco IOS-XE routers and PIM.

In the last lesson, we introduced PIM at a high level and briefly discussed the concept of multicast distribution trees (MDT) and the Rendezvous Point (RP).

In this lesson, we introduce Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) at a high level. Along the way, we present some of the terms and concepts that we will use extensively in the next lessons of the course.

In this lesson, we discuss one of the fundamental multicast features that help switches effectively forward multicast frames only to interested receivers.

The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is the protocol used by hosts to notify the local multicast router on the segment that they want to start receiving or stop receiving multicast traffic for a given multicast IPv4 group address.

In this lesson, we discuss the process of converting a multicast IP address to a multicast MAC address. It is very important to keep in mind that network devices work with IP and MAC addresses only in binary. An IP address is 32 bits of 1 and 0s, while a MAC address is 48 bits of 1s and 0s.

To establish context for this lesson, let's quickly discuss the fundamental process of packet encapsulation.

To understand what IP multicast is, engineers must have a solid understanding of the three different communication methods in IP networks: Unicast, Broadcast, and Multicast.