Patent ID: 7715310

Claim:
A method of providing redundancy for Virtual Private Network (VPN) service with an Ethernet access network, the method comprising: establishing a dedicated pseudowire (PW) connection across a Layer 2 VPN (L2VPN) core network between first and second network-facing provider edge (n-PE) devices associated with the Ethernet access network, the dedicated PW being in addition to a full mesh of PWs associated with a customer Virtual Private Local Area Network service (VPLS) instance, the full mesh of PWs being used for transport of customer data packet traffic across the L2VPN core network, the dedicated PW being for provider Bridge Protocol Data Unit (BPDU) traffic only, the first and second n-PE devices not running a Spanning Tree Protocol (STP); receiving a BPDU at an input interface of the first n-PE device; relaying the BPDU on the dedicated pseudowire, by the first n-PE device, to the second n-PE device without processing the BPDU by the first n-PE device such that the first and second n-PE devices and L2VPN core network appear as a single Local Area Network (LAN) segment to aggregation devices of the Ethernet access network connected to the first and second n-PE devices.