Patent ID: 9479348
Filing Date: 2016-10-25
CPC Classification: H04L

Claim Text:
1. A method of submitting multicast membership packets in a network comprising a plurality of hosts and a switching device comprising a set of ports, the switching device maintaining a multicast group table for each port to identify a set of multicast group addresses that at least one host connected to the port has joined, the method comprising: from a first host connected to a first port of the switching device, sending a multicast packet to a first multicast group address to join the first multicast group address; at the first host, determining that a multicast membership query has not been received by the first host for a particular period of time, the particular period of time determined based on a time out period the switching device uses to remove the first multicast group address from the first port multicast group table when a multicast report packet addressed to the first multicast group is not received at the first port during the time out period; and sending a multicast report packet from the first host to the first multicast group address without receiving a multicast membership query based on the determination that a multicast membership query has not been received by the first host for the particular period of time.