Patent 7286548 was granted and assigned to Redback Networks on October, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method and apparatus for multicast multiple prefetch is described. A method in a network element comprises queuing a set of one or more prefetch requests, wherein a subset of the set of prefetch requests corresponds to a multicast packet, issuing a first of the subset of prefetch requests, and blocking each of the subsequent ones of the subset of prefetch requests.