Importance

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Abstract

A system and method to passively monitor multicast control traffic in the provider backbone. A monitoring station is located within the service provider network. Upon creation of an MVPN session, this monitoring station joins the default multicast distribution tree (“MDT”) in the provider backbone used to handle traffic within that MVPN session, and receives the customer's multicast control traffic encapsulated in packets addressed to the default MDT. Using these two kinds of packets, the monitor learns the following information: the identity of the PE routers participating in the MVPN; the identity of the customer multicast groups that are carried on each provider multicast data tree (MDT); the identity of one or more PE routers participating in each customer group, and the identity of the MDT that it is carried on. This information is collected for each customer multicast group, both upstream and downstream at each PE router.

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First Claim