Patent ID: 8121056

Claim:
A method comprising: establishing a multicast tree comprising a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) tunnel for transporting layer three (L3) multicast data packets through a network, wherein the P2MP tunnel includes 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, wherein each of the plurality of destination devices belongs to at least one of a plurality of multicast virtual private networks (MVPNs), and wherein establishing the multicast tree includes allocating a different inner label with the source device for each of the more than one MVPNs to which the destination devices belong, each of the inner labels identifying the respective MVPN; and transmitting the L3 multicast data packets for a plurality of different MVPNs from the source device through the P2MP tunnel to the plurality of destination devices on the multicast tree by encapsulating each of the multicast data packets at the source device with an outer label and one of the inner labels, each of the inner label being selected by the source device based on the MVPN with which the multicast data packet is associated.