MULTICAST ROUTING WITH MULTICAST VIRTUAL OUTPUT QUEUES AND SHORTEST QUEUE FIRST ALLOCATION

The invention includes a method and apparatus for routing multicast traffic with better performance and reduced Head of Line blocking. This is achieved by means of the use of multiple virtual output queues for each input interface that handles multicast traffic, called “multicast virtual output queues” (MVOQs). Schemes for allocation of queues including random allocation, round robin, and Shortest Queue First (SQF) allocation can further improve performance. In an alternative embodiment, global MVOQs that can be used as queues by multiple input interfaces, can be used instead of MVOQs associated with a specific input interface.