Patent ID: 6950432
Filing Date: 2005-09-27
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A multicasting network route provisioning system for use in allowing an in-session multicast application to switch its path on need, comprising: a datastore of multicast addresses operable to route multicasting traffic over different network paths; a datastore of multicasting sessions having flows of various flow patterns, wherein the flow pattern is defined in terms of a set of source and destination network nodes, and corresponds to multiple routing network paths; and a session management module adapted to aggregate multicasting session flows by allocating multicast addresses to multicasting sessions based on correspondence between the network paths and flow patterns of the multicasting sessions, thereby ensuring that flow patterns corresponding to different sets of network paths do not share a same multicast address, wherein said multicasting session management module is adapted to identify correspondence between flow patterns on a source-independent basis that considers factors including one or more of source, destinations, and application requirements relating to network transmission resources.