Broadcast like UDP with the reliability of TCP

Question

I\'m working on a .net solution that is run completely inside a single network. When users make a change to the system, I want to launch an announcement and have everyone else h

Answer 1

Broadcast is not what you want. Since there could and probably will be devices attached to this network which don't care about your message, you should use Multicast. Unlike broadcast messages, which must be sent to and processed by every client on the network, Multicast messages are delivered only to interested clients (ie those which have some intention to receive this particular type of message and act on it).

If you later scale this system up so that it needs to be routed over a large network, multicast can scale to that, whereas broadcast won't, so you gain a scalability benefit which you might appreciate later. Meanwhile you eliminate unnecessary overhead in switches and other devices that don't need to see these "something changed" messages.