I am setting up a small LAN(20ish hosts) with a many devices which output multicast traffic. I am able to select their destination IP address and port number. There are 1-10 computers on the LAN which will subscribe to 0-to-all multicast streams. Some of the hosts will be unicasting back to some of the devices as well.
One option is to use the same destination IP address for each multicast device and then separate streams by port numbers. This may be easiest for users since they only need to remember 1 IP address and a handful of port numbers. A pitfall of this though is that if a host subscribes to any one of the multicast streams, all the multicast streams go to their ethernet port. This was verified with Wireshark. Also, IGMPv3 join requests don't seem to contain port number information (at least the way we're doing them).
Another option is to use different IP addresses and the same port number. I think this may upset the switch(es?) in the system so I don't want to do this.
The last option is to use different IP address and different port numbers. This may be the best option, but it means users would have to remember many IP addresses and port numbers, and would take up more of the IP pool (not that that's an issue for our small LAN).
Can any of your help me choose between these options based on your experience or best practices?
Thanks,