US Patent 7912056 Dynamic traffic shaping adjustments for distributed multicast replication

A network device keeps track of multicast replication that is occurring at a later link in the network. The device may then intelligently adjust traffic to various end-users based on the bandwidth that is to be allotted to each end-user and based on the bandwidth that is expected to be “created” at the later link in the network. In one exemplary implementation, a device includes logic to process network traffic that includes multicast streams by performing traffic shaping functions that are based on, for each of a number of subscribers, a bandwidth of each of the multicast streams that is being subscribed to by a subscriber and a bandwidth of unicast traffic to the subscriber.