Patent ID: 7843845

Claim:
A method for troubleshooting a multicast flow fault which was caused by an unsuccessful Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) join operation within a layer 2 aggregation network, said method comprising the steps of: flooding a MAC discover message which contains a port identification of a target device which had initiated the IGMP join operation through-out at least a portion of said layer 2 aggregation network to discover a MAC address associated with the target device; receiving a MAC reply message which contains the MAC address from said target device or from a device which is associated with said target device; sending a request message which contains the discovered MAC address via one or more intermediate nodes towards said target device; receiving one or more reply messages from said one or more intermediate nodes and said target device; and analyzing the one or more received reply messages to determine which one of the intermediate nodes and/or the target device had not updated a forwarding database because of the unsuccessful IGMP join operation.