US Patent 11171796 Managing multicast scaling

Some examples relate to managing multicast scaling. In an example, a network device may receive a message to join an IP multicast group. The network device may determine whether a hardware filter is available on the network device to process the received message. In response to the determination that the hardware filter is not available on the network device to process the received message, a current state of an IP multicast protocol associated with the message may be changed to an error state on the network device, wherein in the error state, further messages to join the IP multicast group that are received by the network device are discarded by the network device.