On Sun, 12 Jun 2011 09:45:01 -0400, Leo Bicknell <bickn...@ufp.org> wrote:
In a message written on Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 01:04:41PM +0200, Iljitsch
van Beijnum wrote:
Like I said before, that would pollute the network with many multicasts
which can seriously degrade wifi performance.
Huh? This is no worse than IPv4 where a host comes up and sends a
subnet-broadcast to get DHCP.
Broadcast != Multicast. esp. when talking about wireless chipsets. I've
yet to find a wifi chipset that didn't completely fuck-up when presented
with even a low pps of multicast traffic. Broadcast traffic doesn't seem
to bother them -- it doesn't attempt to filter them in any way, or really
pay them any attention. If I had to guess, the chip firmware is
individually transmitting multicast packets to each peer; a broadcast
packet is sent once to all peers.
I've not had any wireless networks disrupted by broadcast traffic -- and
with Radware load balancers in the network, there are *plenty* of
broadcasts (ARP). Just a few 100pps of multicast and the AP fails.
(linksys, netgear, even cisco... all broadcom crap radios.)
--Ricky
