Method and apparatus for enhancing multicast application support in ATM LAN emulation

摘要

The present invention relates to a mechanism and an apparatus for enhancing multicast application support in an emulated LAN network among ATM LAN emulation services that utilize the advantages of ATM by accommodating an existing large-scale LAN application in an ATM network.;Current LAN emulation adopts the simplest approach of sending broadcast, multicast and initial unicast messages to all stations using broadcasting unbundling server (BUS) and relying on filtering of each station. This method has problems such as waste of virtual channel (VC) resources, overhead of filtering of the receiver, and increase of traffic in the network. Accordingly, in the present invention, a Special Multicast Server (BUS) that can coexist with the broadcasting unreal server BUS and distinguish traffic for different traffic and specific multicast group address (s) SMS) or by using a special LAN Emulation Client (SLEC) to efficiently handle multicast traffic.