Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!ddp+ From: ddp+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Drew Daniel Perkins) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: a proposed modification to ARP Message-ID:Date: 12 Jul 88 01:36:30 GMT References: <88.07.10.1314.590@pescadero.stanford.edu> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 10 I'm not sure if you are really suggesting using 2^24 multicast addresses or not. While quite precise, it would probably be be overkill. Considering that many (most?) of the ethernet chips which support more than 1 multicast address actually support 64, a good compromise between only 1 address and 2^24 addresses might be to reserve 64. Some sort of fast hashing function could be used to map an IP address to one of 64 buckets. This probably rules out the hashing function (CRC's) used by many of the chips themselves. How hard is it to get lots of multicast addresses? Is it possible to buy 2^24 addresses? Drew