Patent ID: 8488614

Claim:
A method comprising: establishing a Resource Reservation Protocol with Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) Label Switched Path (LSP) for carrying traffic across a backbone domain from an ingress router to two or more egress routers, wherein the ingress router and the two or more egress routers are positioned within the backbone domain, and wherein the ingress router is positioned between the egress routers and a source of the traffic; establishing a Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) P2MP LSP between two or more edge domains that are external to the backbone domain by nesting the LDP P2MP LSP within the RSVP-TE P2MP LSP to carry the traffic across the backbone domain; receiving, from one of the edge domains via the LDP P2MP LSP, a packet at the ingress router of the backbone domain; and encapsulating the packet within the RSVP-TE P2MP LSP at the ingress router and forwarding the packet across the backbone domain to the egress routers via the RSVP-TE P2MP LSP.