The multicast technology is to send message to members who have joined a same group. The message will only be distributed among the group members, not broadcasting to the whole world. Therefore, it improves the communication efficiency.

In Mobile Agent Management (MAM) system, each user has its own data sources and each can search interested information from other users' database. Users need to login so that they can have the services. Normally, login information is stored somewhere in a server. You can only administrate the information from there. Besides, the cost to maintain the server is high and the bottleneck caused by the server is severe. With multicast, it is possible not to have a server concept. User's identity information will be kept anywhere in the network. Even though it will take a bit longer time and find and retrieve the information, the high cost to maintain a server can be saved.

In order to collect the information, an agent has to travel to other agents one by one, which increase the round trip time unbearably. The introduction of multicast has changed the way it works. Search request can multicast to multiple agents to query or collect the data back.

As the multicast is still in its experimental stage, the current internetwork is not multicast enabled. Therefore, we have to simulate the environment to setup a gateway as a bridge to connect different subnets. As the follow diagram has shown,

message from subnet A will be multicast to local IPAgents (Information Personae Agent). Each gateway will have to maintain a list of other gateway's ip address, where there are IPAgents running on that subnet. The gateway which receive message from local subnet will send it to all other IPAgents in the network via unicast (one to one message sending). Once a gateway receives a unicast message, it will multicast it to all recepients in local subnet. In the meanwhile this gateway will be able to tell the message is sent from itself and won't send it again to other gateway. These simulate the process of multicasting and all the IPAgents who join the multicast group will get a copy of message and respond if they are able to.