Receiving multiple multicast feeds on the same por

Question

I have an application that is receiving data from multiple multicast sources on the same port. I am able to receive the data. However, I am trying to account for statistics of each group (i.e. msgs received, bytes received) and all the data is getting mixed up. Does anyone know how to solved this problem? If I try to look at the sender's address, it is not the multicast address, but rather the IP of the sending machine.

I am using the following socket options:

struct ip_mreq mreq;         
mreq.imr_multiaddr.s_addr = inet_addr("224.1.2.3");         
mreq.imr_interface.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;         
setsockopt(s, IPPROTO_IP, IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP, &mreq, sizeof(mreq));

and also:

setsockopt(s, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEPORT, &reuse, sizeof(reuse));

Answer 1

After some years facing this linux strange behaviour, and using the bind workaround describe in previous answers, I realize that the ip(7) manpage describe a possible solution :

IP_MULTICAST_ALL (since Linux 2.6.31)
This option can be used to modify the delivery policy of multicast messages to sockets bound to the wildcard INADDR_ANY address. The argument is a boolean integer (defaults to 1). If set to 1, the socket will receive messages from all the groups that have been joined globally on the whole system. Otherwise, it will deliver messages only from the groups that have been explicitly joined (for example via the IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP option) on this particular socket.

Then you can activate the filter to receive messages of joined groups using :

int mc_all = 0;
if ((setsockopt(sock, IPPROTO_IP, IP_MULTICAST_ALL, (void*) &mc_all, sizeof(mc_all))) < 0) {
    perror("setsockopt() failed");
}

This problem and the way to solve it enabling IP_MULTICAST_ALL is discussed in Redhat Bug 231899, this discussion contains test programs to reproduce the problem and to solve it.

Answer 2

Use setsockopt() and IP_PKTINFO or IP_RECVDSTADDR depending on your platform, assuming IPv4. This combined with recvmsg() or WSARecvMsg() allows you to find the source and destination address of every packet.

Unix/Linux, note FreeBSD uses IP_RECVDSTADDR whilst both support IP6_PKTINFO for IPv6.

• http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man7/ip.7.html

Windows, also has IP_ORIGINAL_ARRIVAL_IF

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms741645(v=VS.85).aspx

Answer 3

I have had to use multiple sockets each looking at different multicast group addresses, and then count statistics on each socket individually.

If there is a way to see the "receiver's address" as mentioned in the answer above, I can't figure it out.

One important point that also took me awhile - when I bound each of my individual sockets to a blank address like most python examples do:

sock[i].bind(('', MC_PORT[i])

I got all the multicast packets (from all multicast groups) on each socket, which didn't help. To fix this, I bound each socket to it's own multicast group

sock[i].bind((MC_GROUP[i], MC_PORT[i]))

And it then worked.

Answer 4

You can separate the multicast streams by looking at the destination IP addresses of the received packets (which will always be the multicast addresses). It is somewhat involved to do this:

Bind to INADDR_ANY and set the IP_PKTINFO socket option. You then have to use recvmsg() to receive your multicast UDP packets and to scan for the IP_PKTINFO control message. This gives you some side band information of the received UDP packet:

struct in_pktinfo {
    unsigned int   ipi_ifindex;  /* Interface index */
    struct in_addr ipi_spec_dst; /* Local address */
    struct in_addr ipi_addr;     /* Header Destination address */
};

Look at ipi_addr: This will be the multicast address of the UDP packet you just received. You can now handle the received packets specific for each multicast stream (multicast address) you are receiving.

Answer 5

Replace

mc_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);

with

mc_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr (mc_addr_str);

it's help for me (linux), for each application i receive separate mcast stream from separate mcast group on one port.

Also you can look into VLC player source, it show many mcast iptv channel from different mcast group on one port, but i dont know, how it separetes channel.

Answer 6

IIRC recvfrom() gives you a different read address/port for each sender.

You can also put a header in each packet identifying the source sender.