Patent ID: 7286491

Claim:
An intermediate network device having a plurality of ports for forwarding messages among one or more network entities of a computer network that is segregated into a plurality of virtual local area networks (VLANs), the intermediate network device comprising: a spanning tree engine configured to cooperate in the computation of multiple spanning tree instances within the computer network and, for each spanning tree instance, to transition the ports among a plurality of spanning tree states, including a forwarding state and a blocking state; a Generic Attribute Registration Protocol (GARP) participant at each port, each GARP participant having a Multiple Spanning Tree (MST) GARP VLAN Registration Protocol (MST-GVRP) application and a GARP Information Declaration (GID) component; and a plurality of GARP Information Propagation (GIP) contexts providing communication between the MST-GVRP applications, each GIP context being associated with a single spanning tree instance, wherein participation of the MST-GVRP applications in the GIP contexts depends on the spanning tree states of the respective ports.