Patent ID: 8121123

Claim:
A method for multicasting packets in a passive optical network (PON) residential gateway, comprising: storing a payload portion of an input packet in a memory, wherein the input packet is any one of an upstream packet and a downstream packet; duplicating only a header of the input packet to create duplicated headers as the number of destination endpoint devices; modifying each of the duplicated headers to uniquely designate an output interface of each of a plurality of Ethernet medium access control (MAC) adapters coupled to at least one of the destination endpoint devices; passing to each of the plurality of Ethernet MAC adapters its respective modified header together with a pointer to a location of the payload portion in the memory; generating by the each of the plurality of Ethernet MAC adapters a multicast packet by retrieving the payload portion from the memory and attaching the modified header to the payload portion; and transmitting the multicast packet to the destination endpoint device coupled to the Ethernet MAC adapter.