MULTICASTING IN A HIGH-SPEED SWITCHING ENVIRONMENT

A system for multicasting in a high-speed switching environment includes a data memory logically divided into a plurality of blocks, a plurality of output ports, and a central agent. The central agent can determine whether all one or more output ports for a packet stored in one or more blocks have read the packet. Each block of the packet can be added to a pool of available blocks when a last one of the one or more output ports for the packet has read from the block.