Digital Equipment Corp., Patent Law Group

Robert E Thomas

Radia Joy Perlman

Charles W Kaufman

William R Hawe

A novel mechanism prevents interleaving of packet cells from different source nodes on the same multicast port group at switches of a multicast virtual circuit in a cell-switched network: however, different cells bound for different multicast port groups may be interleaved. The mechanism comprises specific routing information that is stored in each multicast group port entry of a forwarding table located within each switch of the multicast virtual circuit. The forwarding table also stores information relating to each multicast port group including a virtual circuit value for each port of the multicast group. The specific routing information is provided for each multicast port group entry to notify the switch when data traffic for a particular packet is pending through a port of the multicast group and when that data traffic ceases, i.e., when the 'end-of-packet' is reached. This ensures that the packets may be correctly reassembled at the destination nodes.

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Westboro, MA, United States of America

Robert E Thomas