Patent ID: 8184629

Claim:
A method of multicasting, comprising: receiving multicast acknowledgements transmitted from a subset of a plurality of multicast targets, wherein the plurality of multicast targets comprises N multicast targets, wherein each acknowledgement comprises a vector of N bits, and wherein each multicast target sends a separate acknowledgement with a different one of the N bits in the vector in the separate acknowledgement set to indicate an acknowledgement from the corresponding multicast target; encoding a single acknowledgement from the received multicast acknowledgements, wherein encoding the single acknowledgement comprises performing a logical operation to merge the N-bit vectors in each of the received multicast acknowledgements into the single acknowledgement that comprises a vector of N bits, and wherein a given bit in the vector of N bits in the single acknowledgement is set to indicate that the corresponding multicast target successfully received previously-multicasted information or unset to indicate that the corresponding multicast target did not successfully receive previously-multicasted information; and supplying the single acknowledgement to a source of the multicasting, wherein the plurality of multicast targets includes the acknowledging multicast targets.