Maintenance of bandwidth allocation for traffic including multicasts

An apparatus comprising:

• a packet processing stage configured to receive a multicast packet and to store at least a payload of the received multicast packet in a data memory, and to determine a primary control entry for the received multicast packet, the primary control entry denoting a multicast packet;
• a plurality of output queues, at least one output queue being provided for each of a plurality of ports;
• a multicast explosion stage that is configured to determine one or more destinations for the multicast packet, and to convert the primary control entry for the received packet into a plurality of secondary control entries by copying at least a portion of the primary control entry into an output queue for each of a plurality of destination ports for the packet, each of the secondary control entries denoting a unicast packet and including a pointer to a location in the memory where the payload of the received packet is stored, each secondary control entry also including a replication field that indicates whether or not packet replication is to be performed for the control entry;
• a control entry dequeuer configured to dequeue selected secondary control entries in accordance with a scheduling algorithm;
• and
• a frame reader coupled to the control entry dequeuer and data memory, the frame reader configured to receive a dequeued secondary control entry and receive a respective payload and reconstitute a unicast packet for dispatch from the respective destination port based on the received secondary control entry and the respective payload.

An apparatus comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory;
• the processor configured to:
• receive a multicast packet;
• store at least a payload of the received multicast packet in the memory;
• determine a primary control entry for the received multicast packet, the primary control entry denoting a multicast packet;
• convert the primary control entry into a plurality of secondary control entries by copying at least a portion of the primary control entry into an output queue for each of a plurality of destination ports for the packet, each of the secondary control entries denoting a unicast packet and including a pointer to a location in the memory where the payload of the received packet is stored;
• dequeue each secondary control entry, under control of a scheduler;
• reconstitute for transmission a unicast packet associated with each secondary control entry based on the dequeued secondary control entry and the packet payload;
• and
• wherein each secondary control entry includes a replication field indicating whether or not packet replication is to be performed.