Patent ID: 9742673
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: H04L,H04W

Claim:
1. A system comprising: a first and second fabric module, each fabric module having a respective network forwarding engine; and a plurality of line cards coupled to the first and second fabric modules, with each line card having a respective network forwarding engine and a respective local outgoing interface (OIF) list, the respective network forwarding engine of each line card being configured to receive a multicast packet, and wherein each of the plurality of line cards is configured to perform operations comprising: compare a multicast address associated with the received multicast packet with entries in the respective local OIF list; and program the respective local OIF list with the multicast address associated with the received multicast packet if an entry for the multicast address does not exist in the local OIF list; wherein the respective network forwarding engine of the line card is further configured to send a notification to the first and second fabric modules, the notification identifying an association of the multicast address of the received multicast packet with the line card; and wherein when a number of entries in a list of indices for a fabric module exceeds a threshold, the fabric module enters a flood entry for the multicast address.