Broadcasting (networking)

In computer networking, telecommunication and information theory, broadcasting is a method of transferring a message to all recipients simultaneously.

Broadcasting is the most general communication method and is also the most intensive, in the sense that many messages may be required and many network devices are involved.

Broadcasting is largely confined to local area network (LAN) technologies, most notably Ethernet and Token Ring, where the performance impact of broadcasting is not as large as it would be in a wide area network.

The successor to IPv4, IPv6 does not implement the broadcast method, so as to prevent disturbing all nodes in a network when only a few may be interested in a particular service.

Instead, IPv6 relies on multicast addressing - a conceptually similar one-to-many routing methodology.