METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MULTICAST IMPLEMENTATION IN A NETWORK

Interest in multicast group membership may be advertised via a routing system on an Ethernet network along with an indication of an algorithm to be used by the nodes on the network to calculate the distribution tree or trees for the multicast. Each node, upon receipt of the advertisement, will determine the algorithm that is to be used to produce the multicast tree and will use the algorithm to calculate whether it is on a path between nodes advertising common interest in the multicast. Example algorithms may include shortest path algorithms and spanning tree algorithms. This allows multicast membership to be managed via the routing control plane, while enabling spanning tree processes to be used to forward multicast traffic. Since spanning tree is able to install multicast state per service rather than per source per service, this reduces the amount of forwarding state required to implement multicasts on the routed Ethernet mesh network.