Patent ID: 7765300

Claim:
A method, comprising: in response to a request of a subscriber for joining a multicast group received at a centralized aggregation server, transmitting a port subscriber announcement (PSA) message to a plurality of subscriber access multiplexers over an access network, the PSA message including an identifier (ID) of the subscriber; in response to the PSA message, each of the subscriber access multiplexers determining whether there is a subscriber associated with each subscriber access multiplexer having an ID that matches the ID of the subscriber in the PSA message; a subscriber access multiplexer having a subscriber matching the ID of the subscriber in the PSA message identifying a user port corresponding to the subscriber and applying a local service policy to the identified user port; and the subscriber access multiplexer having a subscriber matching the ID of the subscriber in the PSA message transmitting a PSA acknowledgment (PSAA) message to the centralized aggregation server indicating whether the PSA message has been processed successfully, the PSAA message including an ID of the subscriber access multiplexer, wherein subsequent multicast messages destined to the subscriber are delivered by the subscriber access multiplexer to the subscriber based on the local service policy corresponding to the receiving subscriber without having the aggregation server handling the service policy of the receiving subscriber.