Patent ID: 8050267

Claim:
A method comprising: negotiating over a control channel to establish a first set of private L3 addresses for a first LAN and a second set of private L3 addresses for a second LAN, wherein a first gateway node sends to a second gateway node virtual private network (VPN) membership data that indicates a public L3 address for each gateway node that previously negotiated with the first gateway node; communicating over the control channel to establish a first pseudo wire between the gateway nodes for exchanging Ethernet traffic, and to establish a second pseudo wire between the gateway nodes for exchanging IP traffic; providing a different private L3 address for each different end node in the first and second LANs from the first and second sets of private L3 addresses, respectively; receiving at the first gateway node from the first LAN a discovery packet that requests one or both of an identifier or a service associated with nodes on the first LAN; encapsulating the discovery packet in a tunnel packet with a destination L3 address that corresponds to a second public L3 address; sending the tunnel packet over a wide area network, whereby the tunnel packet is delivered to the second gateway node and the discovery packet is extracted from the tunnel packet, wherein the second gateway node is configured to send the discovery packet over the second LAN; receiving at the first gateway node from the second gateway node a tunnel packet that encapsulates a second discovery packet that requests identifiers of nodes on the first LAN for discovering activities for nodes on the second LAN; extracting the second discovery packet; and sending the second discovery packet over the first LAN such that a particular one of the identifiers is used to establish a communication session between the first and second LANs.