Protocol Independent Multicast
![Example of a multicast network architecture](/Images/godic/202502/04/IGMP_basic_architecture4323.png")
Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) is a family of multicast routing protocols for Internet Protocol (IP) networks that provide one-to-many and many-to-many distribution of data over a LAN, WAN or the Internet. It is termed protocol-independent because PIM does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other routing protocols.