Patent ID: 7283563

Claim:
A method comprising the steps of: forwarding by an ingress multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) label switched router (LSR) a set of packets associated with a first set of forwarding equivalence classes (FECs) along a label switched path (LSP) to an egress MPLS LSR; producing by the ingress MPLS LSR an operation and maintenance (OAM) connectivity verification probe message encoding the first set of FECs; forwarding the OAM connectivity verification probe message along the LSP to the egress MPLS LSR; producing by the egress MPLS LSR an encoding of a second set of FECs; comparing by the egress MPLS LSR the encoding of the first set of FECs in the connectivity verification probe message to the encoding of the second set of FECs, and producing by the egress MPLS LSR an indication if the comparison indicates that the first set of FECs is not a subset of the second set of FECs.