Patent ID: 8279871

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving an encapsulated packet from a provider backbone network via an ingress port, wherein the encapsulated packet includes at least an encapsulating header and an inner packet having an inner header; determining a first set of one or more egress ports via which the encapsulated packet is to be forwarded based on at least a backbone virtual local area network identifier (B-VID) in the encapsulating header, wherein the first set of one or more egress ports is coupled to the provider backbone network; forwarding the encapsulated packet to the first set of one or more egress ports; stripping the encapsulating header from the encapsulated packet; forwarding at least a subset of the encapsulated packet to an upstream location in a packet processing pipeline; determining a second set of one or more egress ports via which the inner packet is to be forwarded in response to forwarding the at least the subset of the encapsulated packet to the upstream location in the packet processing pipeline and based on at least a customer destination address (C-DA) in the inner header, wherein the second set of one or more egress ports is coupled to a customer network; and forwarding the inner packet to the second set of one or more egress ports after stripping the encapsulating header.