Can I use broadcast or multicast for TCP?

tcp udp ip broadcast multicast
Alex picture Alex · Jan 21, 2014 · Viewed 37.4k times · Source

For Internet Protocol (IP) I can use multicast:

Also, in example, for UDP I can use:

  • broadcast - to send packet to range of addresses
  • multicast - to send packet to list of specified addresses

But can I use something of these for TCP?

Answer

Steffen Ullrich picture Steffen Ullrich · Jan 21, 2014

No, you can't. TCP is a protocol for communication between exactly two endpoints. Compared to UDP it features reliable transport, that means, that packets get not only send, but it is expected that the peer acknowledges the receipt of the data and that data will be retransmitted if the acknowledgement is missing. And because Broadcast and Multicast only send but never receive data, the reliability of TCP cannot be implemented on top of these protocols.

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