Method for multicasting of packets in PON residential gateways

摘要

A method for multicasting packets in a passive optical network (PON) residential gateway. The method comprises storing a payload portion of an input packet in a memory; duplicating a header of the input packet to create duplicate headers as the number of destination end-point devices; modifying each of the duplicated header to uniquely designate an output interface of an Ethernet medium access (MAC) adapter coupled to at least one of the destination endpoint devices; passing to the Ethernet MAC adapter its respective modified header together with a pointer to a location of the payload portion in the memory; generating a multicast packet by retrieving the payload portion from the memory and attaching the modified header to the payload portion; and transmitting the multicast packet to the destination endpoint device coupled to the Ethernet MAC adapter.