Patent ID: 8023506

Claim:
A sending provider edge (PE) device for advertising and processing pseudo-wire (PW) information, the sending PE device comprising: a processing unit; a storage unit; an interface unit; a representation of a plurality of PWs stored in the storage unit; a representation of a plurality of grouping methods stored in the storage unit; program instructions executable by the processing unit and stored in the storage unit to assign at least one of the plurality of grouping methods to each of the plurality of PWs, thereby creating a set of PW groups; program instructions executable by the processing unit and stored in the storage unit to determine a group identifier for each PW group in the set of PW groups; program instructions executable by the processing unit and stored in the storage unit to transmit a sequence containing the determined group identifiers to a receiving PE device via the interface unit, wherein the sequence of the group identifiers is constructed in a pre-determined format represented by a sequence of group identifiers indexed by their respectively associated grouping methods, and a mask; program instructions executable by the processing unit and stored in the storage unit to determine that a PW group in the set of PW groups is impacted by an event; and program instructions executable by the processing unit and stored in the storage unit to transmit a group-based notification message to the receiving PE device containing information that identifies the PW group impacted by the event.