SLC 5/05 Ethernet question

For a SLC 5/05 talking to a PanelView over Ethernet, is the communication unicast or multicast? My understanding is that the Ethernet switch (such as NTRON 108TX)(this is an unmanaged switch) should send the data only to the destination and not send it out all ports of the switch.
And the reason that this is a concern is that I also have an RF Ethernet link (with limited bandwidth) and I want Panelview data to only go between the PLC and it's local Panelview and not to go over the RF link.
Thanks in advance for any help.

It's definitely unicast between an SLC-5/05 and a PanelView terminal.

The only time any PanelView used multicast was the older PanelView Standards with EtherNet/IP connected to ControlLogix as an I/O object. This was uncommon.

One of the problems with an unmanaged switch is you’re at the mercy of how it’s configured. With managed switches you can configure how it’s going to behave so that it best suits your application or if it’s a self learning switch then it can set its configuration to best suit the application. One thing I’ve seen with lower end unmanaged switches are “unicast floods”. For some reason the switch decides that the packets are broadcast and are released to all of the ports. Usually the reason is the table is too small to handle all of the addresses but there are other reasons. When integrating wireless into SCADA (or any other PLC/PAC network) I’ve always believed that a managed switch is the better way to go (one that has IGMP snooping). You spend a little more money upfront but you’re less likely to have problems down the road (especially if the network grows). If the wireless network has limited bandwidth it’s probably a good idea to make sure it doesn’t see any traffic that’s not meant to use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicast_flood

I was limiting my comments to the original question, but there's a lot more to say about radio links and switch management.

Even the simplest of managed switches give you the most important tool: the ability to "mirror' a switch port so you can analyze the traffic that is flowing through that port. I carry a tiny mirroring switch and an Ethernet dongle for exactly this sort of thing.

It would be helpful to be able to monitor and measure the PanelView-to-SLC traffic to see if there are PanelView application changes you could make to optimize that data flow, but also it's very useful to know if other data you don't expect like RSLinx browsing or "universal plug and play" devices or media streaming devices are unintentionally getting onto that link.

I clearly remember a project in which printers connected to the network in a branch office were sending a flood of discovery packets that were enough to hobble the radio network out in the tank farm. The customer was bizarrely resistant to allowing us to use protocol analyzers on their network, so they suffered with lousy performance for a very long time.

This just occurred to me. Are the PanelViews the old PanelView Standard, or modern PanelView Plus or Plus 6 units ?

There was a thread on this Forum a few months ago in which a PanelView Plus 6 had "Universal Plug and Play" enabled, and it was sending a large volume of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) packets onto the network.

[Link to old thread]