Patent ID: 7792972

Claim:
A packet forwarding control method in a wide area Ethernet network having an edge side packet forwarding apparatus coupled with a plurality of access lines for communicating with user terminals; a plurality of core side packet forwarding apparatuses; and an authentication server storing, in association with corresponding Internet service provider (ISP) domain names, layer 2 tunneling control information including a tunneling type and header information to be applied to a capsulation header corresponding to the tunneling type, each of said core side packet forwarding apparatuses being connected to at least one gateway apparatus of an ISP which is identifiable by one of said ISP domain names and controls a connection between each of the user terminals belonging to the ISP and a layer 3 network, the packet forward control method comprising the steps of: transmitting from said edge side packet forwarding apparatus to said authentication server when a connection request packet for requesting a connection with the layer 3 network has been received from one of said user terminals, a user authentication request message including an ISP domain name and user authentication information each extracted from the connection request packet; replying from said authentication server having received the user authentication request message to said edge side packet forwarding apparatus a response message including the layer 2 tunneling control information corresponding to the ISP domain name specified by the user authentication request message when user authentication succeeded; causing said edge side packet forwarding apparatus having received the response message to register in a first user management table a new table entry indicating the correspondence between a source address of said connection request packet and the layer 2 tunneling control information extracted from the response message, determine the tunneling type in the layer 2 tunneling control information, encapsulate the connection request packet by applying the header information specified in the layer 2 tunneling control information to a capsulation header in accordance with the tunneling type, and transmit the encapsulated connection request packet as a layer 2 tunneling packet to said wide area Ethernet network; and causing one of said core side packet forwarding apparatuses having received said connection request packet in the form of the layer 2 tunneling packet to determine the tunneling type of the connection request packet based on the capsulation header, decapsulate the received packet in accordance with the tunneling type, register in a second user management table a new table entry indicating the correspondence between a source address of the connection request packet and the layer 2 tunneling control information including the tunneling type and the header information of the capsulation header of the layer 2 tunneling packet and forward the decapsulated connection request packet to the gateway apparatus associated with the core side packet forwarding apparatus.