Patent ID: 8149731

Claim:
A method comprising: acquiring, at a transport controller coupled via one or more local network links to one or more intermediate nodes, network topology information that describes a data network's topology; generating, at the transport controller, a transport database from the network topology information, wherein the transport database contains pseudo wire path information that defines paths through intermediate nodes by mapping an ingress label and an ingress interface at a corresponding intermediate node to an egress label and an egress interface at the corresponding intermediate node, the transport database to maintain pseudo wire path information for a plurality of pseudo wires contained in the data network; and distributing pseudo wire path information contained in the transport database from the transport controller, via the one or more local network links, to one or more packet-processing engines (PPEs) contained at the one or more intermediate nodes, to configure the PPEs of the one or more intermediate nodes, based on the pseudo wire path information, to direct data packets acquired by the one or more intermediate nodes on an ingress interface indicated in the distributed pseudo wire path information for a particular one of the plurality of pseudo wires to an egress interface indicated in the distributed pseudo wire path information for the particular one of the plurality of pseudo wires, to obviate a need to implement layer-3 (L3) infrastructure that includes Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) to support pseudo wires.