Patent ID: 7558263

Claim:
A method comprising: using a label distribution protocol, establishing a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) label switched path (LSP) forming a multicast tree having a source device providing an ingress to the multicast tree and a plurality of destination devices providing a plurality of different egresses from the multicast tree within a network, wherein each of the destination devices belongs to at least one multicast virtual private network (MVPN), and where each of the destination devices is associated with one or more customer networks; using a routing protocol different from the label distribution protocol, establishing routing communications between the source device and the one or more destination devices; after establishing the multicast tree, receiving join or prune messages from at least one of the customer networks with one or more of the destination devices, after establishing the multicast tree and receiving the join or prune messages, generating routing protocol advertisements in accordance with the routing protocol; encoding, within the routing protocol advertisements, control information for the MVPNs to form encoded advertisements, wherein the control information encoded within the advertisements includes the join or prune messages received from the at least one of the customer networks; and transmitting the encoded routing protocol advertisements from the destination devices to the source device via the routing protocol to communicate the join or prune messages to the source device of the multicast tree.