Patent ID: 8837281

Claim:
A network component, comprising: an ingress port; a plurality of egress ports; a memory unit comprising a filtering database (FDB), wherein the FDB comprises: a plurality of medium access control (MAC) address and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN) Identifier (VID) (<MAC, VID>) entries; and a wildcard FDB entry corresponding to a VLAN associated with the network component, and a logic unit coupled to the ingress port, the egress ports, and the memory unit, wherein the logic unit is configured to: receive a frame from the ingress port that comprises a destination MAC (DMAC) address and a VID; determine whether the DMAC and the VID from the frame matches one of the <MAC, VID> entries; and forward the frame using the wildcard FDB entry when the DMAC and the VID does not match an <MAC, VID> entry, wherein every local address within the edge-district network has a corresponding <MAC, VID> entry within the FDB.