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FIX Sessions Versus Multicast Market Data

Article Quant Q&A · Author: Andrew
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Summary

This exchange distinguishes a genuine FIX session from a multicast stream that happens to carry FIX-encoded data. A standard FIX session relies on session-level behavior such as heartbeats and resend requests, which assumes communication with a particular counterparty. Those session semantics do not translate directly to one shared multicast session serving multiple clients.

For streaming data, the exchange says multicast can still be used if the payload is FIX encoded; it mentions a general-purpose networking utility as one way to send such traffic and points to a further example. The discussion is brief and gives no implementation details, protocol specification, performance measurements, or advice on reliability and client recovery. Its main lesson is to distinguish FIX message encoding from FIX session management when choosing a distribution design.

Key ideas

  • A FIX session uses counterparty-specific session behavior, including heartbeats and resend requests.
  • FIX is not itself a multicast session protocol.
  • FIX-encoded streaming data can be distributed over multicast without treating the stream as a normal FIX session.
  • The exchange does not provide enough detail to assess reliability or a specific implementation.

Tags

ExecutionMarket microstructure
Full text
# Multicasting with FIX


# Multicasting with FIX












I have a scenario in which a FIX server will send to multiple clients. I have found examples in which this is done by sending to each session round-robin fashion however, is there any facility in FIX that allows what might be called multicasting? I.e. all clients subscribe, for example, to a shared session.

Many thanks.

## Answer by Andrew (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/15984

FIX is not a multicast protocol so if you're talking about genuine FIX sessions with heartbeats and resend requests then no, you can't multicast that. If you just want to FIX encode some streaming data and multicast it, sure you can do that. socat makes multicasting easy.

## Answer by Andrew (score 0)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/16065

This appears to be one approach.

http://www.fixtradingcommunity.org/mod/file/view.php?file_guid=30528

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.