Patent ID: 9313095
Filing Date: 2016-04-12
CPC Classification: H04L,H04N,Y04S

Claim Text:
1. A method comprising: at a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) including multiple media access control (MAC) layers: establishing an individual control plane tunnel between each MAC layer and a corresponding one of multiple physical (PHY) layer devices; sending via respective ones of the control plane tunnels control plane messages from the MAC layers to the PHY layer devices, the messages including multicast address information to enable individual ones of the PHY layer devices to selectively subscribe to multicast Downstream External PHY Interface (DEPI) traffic, each control plane message formatted as an Ethernet packet including an Internet Protocol (IP) header having source and destination IP addresses for the MAC and the PHY layers of the respective control tunnel, and a layer 2 tunneling protocol (L2TP) Attribute Value Pair (AVP) to identify an IP multicast group address to which the PHY layer devices belong and an IP multicast source address corresponding to the respective MAC layer; receiving via the control plane tunnels acknowledgement messages from the PHY layer devices at the MAC layers; establishing, at each MAC layer, an individual data plane multicast session separate from the control plane tunnels and that spans across the corresponding PHY layer device and other ones of the PHY layer devices from which the acknowledgement messages were received; and multicasting DEPI traffic from the MAC layers to the PHY layer devices via the multicast sessions.