Patent ID: 7688832

Claim:
A method for preventing misforwarding of packets from an MPLS network to a virtual private network, the method comprising: receiving at an ingress edge node of the MPLS networks, a cookie, associated Virtual Private Network (VPN) label bound to a route by an egress edge node of the MPLS network, and a forwarding equivalent class, the cookie allocated on a per VPN basis and not configured for use in forwarding the packet in the MPLS network; receiving a packet at the ingress edge node of the MPLS network; inserting the cookie on an MPLS label stack in a data plane of the MPLS network, at the ingress edge node; and transmitting the packet with the cookie in the label stack over the MPLS network to the egress edge node connected to a VPN associated with said VPN labels independent of any tunneling mechanism; wherein the cookie allows the egress edge node to detect if the transmitted packet is misforwarded by comparing the cookie in the label stack of the transmitted packet with a stored cookie label at the egress edge node.