Multicast Parallel Processing with Python

This post is about how to process multicast data in the client side.

Multicast networking is a communication method where a single packet can be sent by a server and received by many clients. A multicast server just need to send a packet once and it will be received by all recipients, since the replication and distribution is performed by the network rather than the head in the server. This kind of architecture scales well to a extremely large amount of receivers.

This kind of architecture is commonly used to distribute audio/visual data streaming and real time stock market data over UDP (User Datagram Protocol).

One of the challenges we might face when processing multicast data in the client side is the throughput. When we have to handle high throughput (flow rate, usually measured in MB/sec), it is required a mechanism to receive data very quickly. If for any reason, the client is not listening at multicast channel, the client will lose packets transmitted in that time interval.

The most obvious reason why a client is not listening is due to a failure, in such a case, of course we will lose packets; but when we have high throughput every microsecond the client is not listening is a chance to lose packets. Let’s jump to the code to review how it works. This is just our socket initialization:

And here is the code where we are listening for multicast packets:

This is simple, the code will just:

Related posts:

You might be wondering, why would I care about losing weight while I’m on vacation? I actually don’t. But because I am more active when I am traveling, I tend to burn more calories. I walk, bike and…

It is important to learn how to segment and personalize emails when doing email marketing. Email segmentation allows you to send personalized, relevant, and valuable content to your email…