So I am working on a project involving networking between lots of nodes. I need the master to be able to send data to all the nodes on the network. I am trying to figure out if Broadcast or Multicast is better. I am looking for it to be able to scale easily while still being reliable enough.
Broadcast seems to be the easy option as it is dead simple to work with. The problem is that it is very noisy. My thought is that vlans could be used to limit where the data gets send. If there was a dedicated vlan that is configured specifically for app communication I could limit which devices are a part of the vlan thus I would limit the reach of the traffic. Also DAWN and usteer use broadcast.
The other option would be multicast. Multicast seems like a better option as it allows for limiting the scope of where the traffic goes. However, it seems like it is way more complex which makes me think that it is more likely to cause issues. I am especially concerned that there could be conflicts in the IPv4 space. While I don't see this being to problematic it could be potentially lead to slow downs in the absolute worst case. I am also concerned that there could end up being routing issues with multicast since it is in layer 3 for the most part.
Any thoughts on what I should use?