Campus lan and Wireless lan solution Design Guide

Multicast domain name services and Bonjour gateway 
Bonjour is Apple’s zero-configuration protocol for advertising, discovering, and connecting to network services 
such as file sharing, print sharing, and media sharing. The Bonjour protocol was originally designed for home 
network use and uses multicast domain name services (mDNS) via link-local multicasting to share network 
services. Although this approach works well in home networks, a limitation of link-local multicasting is that these 
network services will only be shared within a single Layer 2 domain (such as a VLAN or WLAN). In a WLAN 
enterprise scenario, you use different WLANs and VLANs for different classes of devices, including corporate 
devices, employee devices, personal devices, and guest devices (as well as quarantine WLANs for unapproved 
devices). As such, basic Bonjour operations—such as printing to a wired printer from a WLAN—may not be 
natively supported. 
To address this limitation and to meet user demand for BYOD Apple devices within the enterprise, Cisco 
developed the Bonjour Gateway feature for its WLCs, in addition to Service Discovery Gateway (SDG) on 
Catalyst switches and the cisco DNA Service for Bonjour on Cisco DNA Center. The Bonjour Gateway feature for 
WLCs solves the Layer 2 domain limitation for Bonjour by allowing the WLC to snoop, cache, and proxy-
respond to Bonjour service requests that may reside on different Layer 2 domains. Additionally, these responses 
may be selectively controlled by administrative policies, so that only certain Bonjour services will be permitted in 
specific Layer 2 domains. 
The Bonjour protocol uses mDNS queries. These queries are sent over UDP port 5353 to these reserved group 
addresses: 
● 
IPv4 Group Address:
224.0.0.251
● 
IPv6 Group Address:
FF02::FB
It is significant to highlight that mDNS addresses used by Bonjour are link-local multicast addresses and are only 
forwarded within the local Layer 2 domain, because link-local multicast is meant to stay local by design. 
Furthermore, routers cannot even use multicast routing to redirect the mDNS queries, because the time-to-live 
(TTL) of these packets is set to the value 1. 
This link-local multicast limitation of Bonjour mDNS is illustrated in the following figure. 

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