Background

Multicast and broadcast are modes of one-to-many communication, which can help enterprises reduce network bandwidth consumption and network load through point-to-multipoint efficient data transmission.
If unicast is used, the sending server needs to separately send to N servers for total N times. If multicast is used, the server sends the same data to N servers only once, which reduces server resource consumption and also bandwidth resources of the backbone network.

• Multicast: Tencent Cloud supports multicast on the VPC dimension.
• Broadcast: Tencent Cloud supports broadcast on the subnet dimension.

Note：

• The broadcast and multicast features are currently in beta phase. To become a beta user, please submit an application for broadcast or multicast.
• Currently, the broadcast and multicast features are available in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, China.

Overview

Multicast and broadcast are mostly used in the financial and game industries:

• Broadcast services or market data of the financial industry. For example, after obtaining stock prices and other real-time data, brokers can broadcast stock data to multiple clients in real time, effectively reducing network load.
• For the game industry, broadcast and multicast are mainly used for heartbeat holding between multiple servers.

This document describes how to enable or disable broadcast for subnets.

Directions

Enabling broadcast

1. Log in to the VPC console.
2. Click Subnet on the left sidebar to access the management page.
3. In the VPC list, locate the VPC for which you want to enable broadcast, and slide to Enable under the Subnet broadcast column.

Disabling broadcast

1. Log in to the VPC console.
2. Click Subnet on the left sidebar to access the management page.
3. In the VPC list, locate the VPC for which you want to disable broadcast, and slide to Disable under the Subnet broadcast column.

Relevant Operations

For detailed directions regarding VPC multicast, see Enabling or Disabling Multicast.