Unicast is data transmission from a single sender (red) to a single receiver (green). Other devices on the network (yellow) do not participate in the communication.
In
computer networking, unicast is a
one-to-one transmission from one point in the network to another point; that is, one sender and one receiver, each identified by a
network address.
Unicast is in contrast to
multicast
In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused wi ...
and
broadcast which are one-to-many transmissions.
Internet Protocol unicast delivery methods such as
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
User Datagram Protocol
In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) netwo ...
(UDP) are typically used.
See also
*
Anycast
*
Broadcast, unknown-unicast and multicast traffic
*
IP address
*
IP multicast
*
Routing
References
External links
*
*
Internet architecture
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