Patent ID: 8817648

Claim:
A method of initiating a wildcard pseudowire status message using multiple pseudowire group elements to which a pseudowire belongs, comprising: performing the following steps on a provider edge device: storing, on the provider edge device, mapping information of pseudowire extended group elements it has learned from neighboring devices through an implementation of a set of two or more contiguous segments that behave and function as a single point-to-point pseudowire; detecting a change in status of a resource associated with the provider edge device; determining if a pseudowire is affected by the change in status; determining, responsive to a pseudowire being affected by the change in status, a pseudowire group of the pseudowire, based on the pseudowire extended group-mapping information; forming a wildcard pseudowire status message that includes an indication of the pseudowire extended groups; and forwarding the wildcard pseudowire status message to a next hop of the provider edge device in a path of the pseudowire.