Patent ID: 7911980

Claim:
A method for transmission of multicast traffic through a switching system having a plurality of ports with input buffers and a cross-bar switching fabric, comprising: receiving a first packet of information for a multicast group at a first port of the switching system, wherein the multicast group corresponds to a plurality of ports, wherein the first packet of information comprises a packet label comprising an address of a port that sources the multicast traffic and a session number of a multicast session; forwarding the first packet of information to a first subset of the plurality of ports; receiving the first packet of information at one port of the first subset of the plurality of ports of the switching system; and forwarding in a forwarding operation the first packet of information from the one port of the first subset of the plurality of ports to a second subset of the plurality of ports of the switching system, wherein the forwarding operation includes: referring to a forwarding tree that specifies an order of forwarding packets by ports within a multicast group; and transmitting the first packet of information through ports based on the packet label of the first packet of information identifying the multicast group from a plurality of multicast groups and the forwarding tree; wherein the forwarding operation includes scheduling packets for transmission using a maximal matching protocol wherein the maximal matching protocol does not leave an input-output pair unmatched if there is a packet from an input to an output.