Patent ID: 8379641

Claim:
A method for reducing computational or bandwidth requirements in a network including a multicast router and a layer 2 network element by efficiently communicating required source state information, the method comprising the steps of: receiving at the layer 2 network element, executing a modified host management protocol, a source interest list from a host over a multicast network, wherein the source interest list identifies at least one multicast source to be one of excluded or included from routing to the host; responsive to the step of receiving, transmitting by the layer 2 multicast network element a message to the multicast router, wherein the message is formatted to be processed by a multicast routing protocol on the multicast router after a light host management protocol (LHMP) header is removed by the LHMP on the multicast router without any additional processing of the message by the LHMP at the multicast router; and responsive to receiving the message at the multicast router, the light host management protocol removing the LHMP header and sending the message to the multicast routing protocol to alter a set of multicast sources to be routed to the host, where the LHMP header is identified by a field in the LHMP header that indicates a body of the message can be directly processed by the multicast routing protocol.