Patent ID: 6947419

Claim:
An apparatus for distributing multicast messages associated with a multicast address among ports of a network device on the basis of a virtual local area network (VLAN), one or more VLANs within the network device are assigned to the multicast address, each VLAN having a multicast destination subset which includes one or more destination ports assigned from the ports of the network device, the apparatus comprising: a means for generating a group of multicast destination ports by collectively combining every multicast destination subset within all of the VLANs assigned to the multicast address on the network device; and a plurality of translation engines respectively associated with each port of the network device, each translation engine independently performing a VLAN identifier (VID) translation in parallel on each port which belongs to the group of multicast destination ports; wherein the group of multicast destination ports are all of the destination ports assigned to the multicast address on the network device.