Constraining flooding of multicast traffic in Layer2 networks

摘要

A mechanism for a network device to constrain multicast flooding of out-of-profile multicast frames is provided by defining a multicast flood domain that includes a subset of ports that are members of the broadcast domain. Such a multicast flood domain can be user configured or dynamically configured to include device ports that are coupled to network elements that should receive such out-of-profile multicast transmissions and exclude network elements that should not receive such multicast transmissions. In one embodiment of the present invention, such capability is provided by incorporating into a network device a mechanism for performing a multicast flood domain lookup of an address table in the event that an out-of-profile multicast frame is received.