Patent ID: 7620043

Claim:
A MAC bridge filter comprising: circuitry operable to receive network traffic from a LAN network over a LAN port and an optical network over a ring port, wherein a packet of network traffic is received on a one of the ring port or a LAN port, the packet having at least one of a MAC address of a source of the packet and a MAC address of a destination of the packet; a lookup table operable to store a plurality of cyclic redundancy check hashes, each cyclic redundancy check hash generated from data including a MAC address, wherein the MAC address is a 48 bit MAC address and the least significant 15 bits of the MAC address are not stored in the lookup table; circuitry operable to lookup the MAC address of the packet in the lookup table, comprising: circuitry operable to generate a cyclic redundancy check hash of data including the MAC address of the packet and at least one of an identifier assigned to a service provider that is included with the packet that and associated with a network port on which the packet was received or a network port from which the packet is to be transmitted and an identifier assigned to a customer that is included with the packet that and associated with a network port on which the packet was received or a network port from which the packet is to be transmitted, and circuitry operable to lookup the MAC address of the packet in the lookup table using the generated cyclic redundancy check hash of the data including the MAC address of the packet; and circuitry operable to pass or drop each packet based on whether or not the MAC address of the packet is found in the lookup table.