Patent ID: 7480732

Claim:
A method of minimizing resources required in a switch to support a point-to-multi-point application from a server system to a plurality of subscribers, wherein said resources comprise a plurality of entries in a forwarding table, said method comprising: providing in said switch a point-to-multi-point virtual connection containing a plurality of branches, wherein each of said branches is provisioned as a permanent virtual circuit (PVC) and allows data received from said server system to be forwarded to at least one subscriber contained in said plurality of subscribers; storing a set of VPI/VCIs in said forwarding table, with each of said set of VPI/VCIs identifying a corresponding one of said set of active branches and being stored in a corresponding one of said plurality of entries; determining whether each branch contained in said plurality of branches is active, wherein a branch is determined to be not active if a segment loopback cell for the branch is not received for a pre-specified amount of time, and to be active otherwise, wherein said segment loopback cell is designed to confirm whether the corresponding branch is operational end-to-end, wherein a set of active branches comprise the specific ones of said plurality of branches determined to be active by said determining; and deleting a VPI/VCI in an entry of said forwarding table if a branch corresponding to the VPI/VCI is determined to be not active, thereby allocating more resources to each of said branches if the corresponding branch is active than if the corresponding branch is not active, wherein each of said branches need not be established by a signaling process if the corresponding branch changes from said inactive state to said active state, and wherein each of the cells received from said server on said point-to-multi-point virtual connection is transmitted on all of said branches which are active, receiving a plurality of cells from said server system for transmission on said point-to-multi-point virtual connection; and forwarding said plurality of cells on all the branches corresponding to the VPI/VCIs of said point-to-multi-point connection in said forwarding table.