Patent ID: 8837479

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, with a network device, a primary multicast stream and a secondary multicast stream, wherein the primary multicast stream and the secondary multicast stream are redundant multicast streams received over disjoint multicast forwarding paths; applying a hardware-based analyzer in a forwarding plane of the network device to detect when a quality of the primary multicast stream has fallen below a threshold; in response to detecting that the quality of the primary multicast stream has fallen below a threshold and the secondary multicast stream has a quality that meets the threshold and, with a hardware-based monitor block of the forwarding plane of the network device, reprogramming a hardware-based selector block of the forwarding plane to produce a value indicating that an incoming interface on which the secondary multicast stream is received is an expected incoming interface for the redundant multicast streams; forwarding packets received on the secondary multicast stream in response to determining that the packets were received on the expected incoming interface output by the selector block; and discarding packets of the primary multicast stream for which the quality has fallen below the threshold in response to determining that the packets of the primary multicast stream were not received on the expected incoming interface output by the selector block.