Patent ID: 7715379

Claim:
An Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) Bridge device configured to establish Ethernet MAC circuit functionality for Ethernet networks, comprising: a MAC Bridge configured to support learning based on source MAC addresses to ingress port mapping stored by a higher layer routing application, a signaling application, or both in a mapping database by request to establish an Ethernet MAC circuit; a MAC sublayer, wherein the MAC sublayer is configured to generate an interrupt when a Ethernet frame of unknown source and/or destination MAC address is received and queue a request to a higher layer routing and/or signaling application; a plurality of Address Table (AT) entries having at least a destination MAC address field, a source MAC address field, and a port to forward frame to field; wherein the destination MAC address field and/or the source MAC address field is utilized to lookup an Ethernet frame destination MAC address and/or an Ethernet frame source MAC address and forward the Ethernet frame to a port in one of the plurality of AT entries to establish the Ethernet MAC circuit.