Patent ID: 8379559

Claim:
A system comprising: a wireless access point comprising an input circuit configured to receive a first packet of data, wherein the first packet has an Internet Protocol (IP) multicast destination address; a controller configured to identify one or more wireless clients based on (i) the IP multicast destination address, and (ii) unicast media access control (MAC) addresses of the one or more wireless clients; a packet circuit configured to generate one or more second packets of the data by (i) making a copy of the first packet, and (ii) inserting, in the copy, one of the unicast MAC addresses as a destination MAC address; and a wireless output circuit configured to wirelessly transmit the one or more second packets of the data; and the one or more wireless clients, wherein one of the wireless clients comprises a wireless input circuit configured to wirelessly receive one of the second packets, wherein the one of the second packets includes (i) the IP multicast destination address as an IP destination address; and (ii) the one of the unicast MAC addresses as the destination MAC address; an address conversion circuit configured to generate a multicast MAC address based on the IP multicast destination address by copying a predetermined number of bits of the IP multicast destination address to a portion of the multicast MAC address; an address replacement circuit configured to replace the destination MAC address of the one of the second packets with the multicast MAC address; and an output circuit configured to transmit the one of the second packets; wherein the wireless access point further comprises a snoop circuit configured to generate a table relating MAC addresses of the wireless clients with multicast IP addresses; enable multicast traffic for the one of the wireless clients in response to receiving an Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) message from the one of the wireless clients by adding an entry to the table for the one of the wireless clients in response to the entry not existing in the table and starting a timeout timer for the one of the wireless clients, or restarting the timeout timer in response to the entry existing in table; keep the multicast traffic for the one of the wireless clients enabled as long as the timeout timer is reset before expiring; and disable the multicast traffic for the one of the wireless clients by removing the entry from the table in response to (i) the timeout timer expiring or (ii) receiving an IGMP leave message from the one of the wireless clients.