Maintenance of bandwidth allocation for traffic including multicasts

Multicast packets that are received on a port of a network device and forwarded from multiple output ports are stored in memory (13) and respective primary control entries (60) which define them are converted to secondary control entries defining multiple unicast packets before a scheduling algorithm is applied. The packets are reconstituted after the application of the scheduling algorithm has been applied to the control entries. For VPLS packets that are received on a single port and replicated multiple times on one or more output ports, a replication database (18) may be used in conjunction with a replication engine to convert the control entry for a received packet into multiple control entries defining unicast packets for each of the destination ports before the scheduling algorithm is applied. This method is applicable to the replication of packets onto a Virtual Private LAN.