Patent ID: 8064474

Claim:
A method of selecting a proxy station to respond to a multicast message sent from a first station in a shared medium network, the method comprising: maintaining, by the first station, availability information about other stations that are identified to the first station in transmissions over the shared medium; selecting, by the first station, one of the other stations to serve as a multicast proxy to respond to the multicast message sent from the first station using the availability information and predetermined selection criteria; and updating, by the first station, the availability information associated with the selected station if the selected station fails to respond to the multicast message within a predefined time limit, where the updating comprises updating the availability information associated with the selected station to indicate that the selected station should not be used as a multicast proxy until a subsequent transmission over the shared medium provides physical layer feedback which indicates that the selected station can be used as a multicast proxy; wherein updating the availability information if the selected station fails to respond to the multicast message reduces a probability that the selected station that failed to respond to the multicast message will be selected to serve as the multicast proxy in a subsequent proxy selection procedure.