Patent ID: 8391182

Claim:
A method comprising; identifying a plurality of network interfaces of a network device that are configured to communicate with other network devices in a first computer network as network-to-network interfaces (NNIs); identifying one or more network interfaces of the network device that are configured to provide access to the first computer network to user devices as user-to-network interfaces (UNIs); selecting one or more NNIs of the plurality of NNIs to forward traffic from the network device to an aggregation device of the first network that couples the first computer network to a second computer network; designating one or more NNIs of the plurality of NNIs that have not been selected to forward traffic from the device to the aggregation device as network-to-network interface alternates (NNI-ALTs); and treating the one or more NNI-ALTs as UNIs for user data traffic forwarding is decisions.