What is IP Multicast Address

There are four differnt forms of the IP addressing i.e. Unicast, broadcast, Anycast and Multicast. IP multicast is a technique of sending the data to a group of recipients.  It is an one-to-many data transmission method over the IP network.   IP multicast saves the network bandwidth as the packets are traveled as a stream.  It is a good alternative to the IP broadcast and the unicast transmission systems. 

IP multicasting relies on the two methods i.e. group management protocols and the multicast routing protocols. Multicast addresses can’t be clashed with other addresses as a portion of IP multicast address is fixed for the multicasting.  The address range of the multicast is 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 and it belongs to the class D.  Multicast is not a connection-oriented mechanism so the TCP is not suitable.