Patent ID: 8837299

Claim:
A method of monitoring traffic within a network, the method comprising: receiving, at a first node of a network, an input linktrace message from a second node, wherein the first node comprises a maintenance association intermediate node for a traffic engineered service instance configured on the first node, and wherein the traffic engineered service instance comprises at least one pair of co-routed Ethernet Switched Paths (ESPs), each component ESP of each pair of co-routed ESPs traversing a common bridge and being associated with a tuple comprising an ESP-Medium Access Control (ESP-MAC) Destination Address (DA), an ESP-MAC Source Address (SA), and an ESP-Virtual Local Access Network IDentifier (ESP-VID), and wherein the input linktrace message includes a destination address parameter identifying the ESP-MAC DA of a first component ESP associated with the traffic engineered service instance and a Virtual Local Access Network IDentifier (VID) parameter identifying the ESP-VID of the first component ESP; identifying an egress port on which to forward the input linktrace message based on both the destination address parameter and the VID parameter of the input linktrace message; and forwarding the input linktrace message to a third node using the identified egress port.