Patent ID: 8009674

Claim:
A method for processing ingress data received by an edge device of a transport network from a local source customer edge device to be sent to a destination customer edge device, the ingress data belonging to a virtual private network having multiple channels corresponding to multiple customer edge devices, the method comprising: a) determining both a first label and a second label using a channel identifier of the ingress data, the channel identifier identifying one of a first plurality of channels associated with the virtual private network; b) adding the first and second labels to the data to generate modified data; and c) using the first label to forward the modified data towards an egress edge device of the transport network, wherein the second label is to be used by the egress edge device to associate the ingress data with both a destination device and one of a second plurality of channels associated with the virtual private network, and wherein the source customer edge device communicates with the destination customer edge device using a different channel identifier than the channel identifier used by the destination customer edge device to communicate to the source customer edge device, thereby decoupling the channel identifiers used by the source and destination customer edge devices.