What type of GigE switch do I need to use?
Commercially available GigE switches range widely in price and feature functionality. The feature set you need is dictated by your application requirements. In general, the amount of memory in a switch and its packet forwarding rate are directly proportional to its maximum sustained data rate. To achieve GigE’s full, 1-Gb/s data rate on all ports, the switch should ideally be non-blocking, and it needs to support jumbo frames of 8192 bytes. If you want to multicast, or simultaneously send, data to many PCs or other devices, the switch needs to support IGMPv2. If you only need to multicast from a single iPORT to a few PCs, then the broadcasting capability of almost any switch will suffice.
