Unicast Multicast Broadcast Anycast and Incast Traffic Types will be explained in this post. Traffic flow/traffic types are important information that needs to be considered in Network Design, thus understanding each one of them by every IT Engineer is critical and Important for Application requirements, Security, and Performance of the overall system.

In this blog post, Unicast, Multicast, Broadcast, and Anycast traffic types/patterns will be explained with examples and the topologies.
Unicast Traffic Flow
Unicast traffic type is a point-to-point communication type. Usually from a scalability perspective, Unicast is not the desired traffic type. But if there are only two points that communicate with each other, Unicast is an optimal choice.
Multicast Traffic Flow
Point to Multipoint or Multi-Point to Multi-Point Traffic type. If the communication is targeted to a group of recipients, then the Multicast traffic type is more suitable. Multicast source/sender, receivers, and multicast groups are the components of Multicast communication. A classical example is IPTV – IP Television.
One multicast group is assigned for each IPTV channel and only interested receivers get the stream.
Broadcast Traffic Flow
If traffic is sent to everyone, regardless of considering if there is an uninterested receiver, then it is a broadcast Continue reading