Patent ID: 8125926

Claim:
A border device in a first autonomous system (AS) comprising: an auto-discovery module that automatically discovers network devices included in the first AS and a border device in a second AS that are members of an inter-AS virtual private local area network service (VPLS); a location table associated with the inter-AS VPLS that records associations between the network devices and the first AS and an association between the border device and the second AS of the network devices; a signaling module that automatically establishes a plurality of intra-AS pseudowires from the border device of the first AS to each of the network devices in the first AS and a single inter-AS pseudowire from the border device of the first AS to the border device in the second AS based on the location table to carry layer two (L2) communications between the plurality of intra-AS pseudowires of the first AS and the second AS; and a VPLS module that maintains a medium access control (MAC) table associated with the inter-AS VPLS to record associations between the intra-AS pseudowires and MAC addresses of customer devices located within customer networks attached to the network devices in the first AS, wherein the VPLS module receives data packets from the single inter-AS pseudowire that are destined for one the network devices in the first AS, and wherein the VPLS module forwards the data packets from the inter-AS pseudowire to the intra-AS pseudowires that are associated in the MAC table with MAC addresses of the network devices to which the data packets are destined.