Patent ID: 7009972

Claim:
In a communication system organized into a plurality of participating zones for a call, a method comprising: joining, by one or more recipient devices including at least a source zone packet duplicator, a multicast address associated with the source zone, defining a source zone multicast address; establishing, by one or more network devices, a source zone multicast routing tree logically interconnecting the recipient devices having joined the source zone multicast address; and sending, from a communication source in the source zone to the one or more network devices, one or more packets addressed to the source zone multicast address; distributing one or more packets for the call, within the source zone of the participating zones, via the source zone multicast routing tree; receiving the packets by a host associated with the source zone; forwarding the packets by the host associated with the source zone to one or more hosts associated with listening zones of the participating zones; receiving the packets by the hosts associated with the listening zones; and separately re-distributing the packets within the listening zones via one or more separate listening zone multicast routing trees.