Patent ID: 8325725

Claim:
A method in a first network element for reducing computational and/or bandwidth requirements of multicast routing by efficiently communicating required source state information, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a source interest list from a host over a network, wherein the source interest list identifies at least one multicast source to be one of excluded and included from routing to the host; identifying by a modified host management protocol a difference between the source interest list and a source state maintained by the first network element, wherein the source state includes at least one of an exclude state and an include state, wherein the exclude state identifies at least one multicast source to exclude from any one of a plurality of hosts in communication with the first network element, the plurality of hosts including the host, and wherein the include state identifies at least one multicast source to provide to the plurality of hosts; providing by the modified host management protocol the difference between the source interest list and the source state to a multicast routing protocol to alter the set of multicast sources to be routed to the host, the difference being a partial part of the source interest list.