Patent ID: 7649882
Filing Date: 2010-01-19
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method of routing packets of one or more multicast sessions between ingress ports and egress ports of a switch, the method comprising the steps of: (a) queuing i) each arriving packet in a corresponding session queue, and ii) an identifier for each new multicast session to a list-of-sessions queue; (b) queuing a descriptor associated with one or more packets of each multicast session in the list-of-sessions queue to a plurality of interface descriptor queues, each interface descriptor queue associated with only one corresponding egress port of the switch; (c) selecting, for each of a plurality of non-empty interface descriptor queues, one descriptor of the non-empty interface descriptor queue; (d) transmitting, for each of the plurality of non-empty interface descriptor queues, one or more packets associated with the selected descriptor in the non-empty interface descriptor queue to the corresponding egress port, and (e) guaranteeing a bounded time interval between the arrival of an arriving packet at a corresponding session queue and completion of the transmission to the corresponding egress ports of all of the one or more packets corresponding to the arriving packet, wherein: the bounded time interval is based on the number of multicast sessions and the fan-out of each of the multicast sessions; the fan-out is defined as the number of egress ports for which packets of a multicast session are to be replicated; and the fan-out is less than the total number of egress ports of the switch.