DHCP in Windows Server 2003 allows the assignment of multicast addresses in addition to unicast addresses. This feature benefits network administrators by enabling assignment of multicast addresses in the same fashion as unicast addresses, allowing complete utilization of the existing infrastructure.
Conferencing and audio applications typically use multicast address allocation, which requires users to specially configure multicast addresses. Unlike IP broadcasts, to which all computers on the network have access, broadcast multicast addresses are used to send traffic to a group of computers using the concept of group membership to identify the message recipients.
The multicast address allocation feature has two parts: The server implementation provides multicast addresses and the client has APIs that applications can use to request, renew, and release multicast addresses. To use this feature, the administrator first configures the multicast scopes and the corresponding multicast IP ranges on the server using the DHCP snap-in, allowing multicast address management that is similar to the typical management of IP addresses. The client can use APIs to request a multicast address from a scope. The underlying implementation uses DHCP-compatible packets between client and the server.
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