Patent ID: 8787375

Claim:
A system comprising: a multicast queue configured to enqueue multicast packets received from an upstream source to downstream destinations; a plurality of traffic identifier (TID) queues configured to at least enqueue multicast-to-unicast converted packets for the downstream destinations associated with the TID queues; a backpressure-aware scheduling engine coupled to the multicast queue and the plurality of TID queues; wherein, in operation, the backpressure-aware scheduling engine: dequeues a multicast packet from the multicast queue; identifies a subplurality of the TID queues associated with the multicast packet; identifies a first proper subset of the subplurality of the TID queues that are full; converts the multicast packet into a multicast-to-unicast converted unicast packet for each TID queue in a second proper subset of the subplurality of the TID queues, wherein the first proper subset and the second proper subset are disjoint; enqueues the multicast-to-unicast converted unicast packet in the second proper subset of the subplurality of the TID queues, wherein multicast packets are selectively dropped with respect to the first proper subset of the subplurality of the TID queues.