Patent ID: 8428062

Claim:
A method comprising: establishing, via a bridge connected to a service provider network, one or more tunnels between one or more customer networks and the service provider network; receiving, by the bridge, one or more media access control (MAC) Registration Protocol (MMRP) messages being transmitted via the one or more tunnels, the one or more MMRP messages being associated with a service virtual local area network (SVLAN) tag and one or more multicast MAC addresses; snooping, by the bridge, the one or more MMRP messages to obtain the one or more multicast MAC addresses associated with the one or more MMRP messages; constructing, by the bridge and based on the SVLAN tag, a multicast distribution tree, the multicast distribution tree being associated with a subset of bridges in a spanning tree to receive multicast registration requests; constructing, by the bridge, one or more multicast forwarding tables based on the multicast distribution trees and the one or more multicast MAC addresses obtained from snooping the one or more MMRP messages; and multicasting, by the bridge and based on the one or more multicast forwarding tables, one or more data units towards one or more destinations associated with the one or more multicast MAC addresses.