Patent ID: 7933268

Claim:
A method of forwarding a multicast Medium Access Control (MAC) frame through a subset of a plurality of egress ports on a network device, the method comprising: specifying, for a plurality of forwarding database entries in a forwarding database, a group of egress ports, a source internet protocol (IP) address, a destination IP multicast address, and a VLAN-ID (Virtual Local Area Network Identifier), the forwarding database accessible by a bridge engine of a MAC bridge, and the bridge engine associated with respective engines corresponding to a plurality of ingress ports and respective engines corresponding to the plurality of egress ports; receiving a multicast MAC frame; retrieving a source IP address, a destination IP multicast address, and a VLAN-ID from the multicast MAC frame; accessing, using the bridge engine, the forwarding database to perform a single lookup based on the retrieved source IP address, the retrieved destination IP multicast address, and the retrieved VLAN-ID to match the retrieved source IP address, the retrieved destination LP multicast address, and the retrieved VLAN-ID with one of the plurality of forwarding database entries to select a corresponding group of egress ports; and forwarding the payload of the multicast MAC frame to the corresponding group of egress ports.