Patent ID: 7733811

Claim:
A method for bridging traffic over a resilient packet ring (RPR) network, comprising: at each of a plurality of RPR stations coupled to the network, determining the remote address of one or more remote devices that are coupled to each particular station; at each of the plurality of stations, communicating forwarding information to each of the other stations coupled to the ring in one or more RPR attribute discovery (ATD) control frames, the forwarding information associating the remote address of each of the remote devices coupled to the particular station with an address of the station; at each of the plurality of stations, receiving the forwarding information from the other stations coupled to the ring; at each station receiving the forwarding information, storing the forwarding information in a forwarding database of the station; after completing the previous steps, then at a first station of the plurality of stations, receiving traffic from a first remote device coupled to the first station, the traffic including a destination address that comprises a remote address of a second remote device coupled to a second station of the plurality of stations; at the first station, identifying an address of the second station associated with the remote address of the second remote device in the forwarding database of the first station, wherein the remote address of the second remote device was stored in the forwarding database of the first station in the previous steps; and communicating the traffic from the first station directly to the second station using the identified address of the second station.