MRP allows bridges, switches or other similar devices to register and de-register attribute values, such as VLAN identifiers and multicast group membership across a large local area network.
GARP defines the architecture, rules of operation, state machines and variables for the registration and de-registration of attribute values.
This change essentially moved the definitions of GARP, GVRP, and GMRP into an 802.1Q-based environment, implying they were already VLAN aware.
[1] The new protocol and applications fixed a problem with the old GARP-based GVRP-based system, where a simple registration or a failover could take an extremely long time to converge on a large network,[2] incurring a significant bandwidth degradation.
The purpose of MMRP is to allow multicast traffic in bridged LANs to be confined to areas of the network where it is required.
MVRP, which replaced GVRP, is a standards-based Layer 2 network protocol, for automatic configuration of VLAN information on switches.
The main purpose of MVRP is to allow switches to automatically discover some of the VLAN information that would otherwise need to be manually configured.