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Hardware-accelerated packet multicasting in a virtual routing system

  • US 8,644,311 B2
  • Filed: 04/24/2011
  • Issued: 02/04/2014
  • Est. Priority Date: 11/18/2002
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A method comprising:

  • providing a virtual routing engine (VRE) including a plurality of virtual routing processors and corresponding memory systems, the VRE implementing a plurality of virtual routers (VRs) operable on one or more of the plurality of virtual routing processors and associated routing contexts utilizing a plurality of multicast address spaces resident in the corresponding memory systems; and

    simultaneously performing multicasting on behalf of a plurality of subscribers of a service provider by, for each of a plurality of multicast flows originated by the plurality of subscribers;

    selecting a VR of the plurality of VRs to handle multicast packets associated with the multicast flow;

    switching a routing context of the VRE to the associated routing context of the selected VR; and

    forwarding a multicast packet of the multicast flow to a plurality of multicast destinations by reading at least a portion of the multicast packet from a common buffer for each instance of multicasting and applying destination specific transform control instructions to the multicast packet for each instance of multicasting.

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