Method and system for transparent LAN services in a packet network

1. A method for providing Transparent LAN Services (TLS) in an Ethernet network, the method comprising:

provisioning, in the Ethernet network including a plurality of customer premises equipment (CPEs) configured to connect to internal network entities of a customer network portion, each coupled to at least one edge bridge of a provider network portion interconnecting separate customer network portions, said at least one edge bridge including at least one Network to Network Interface (NNI) port and one User to Network Interface (UNI) port, a full mesh of point to point connections between at least three CPEs in the Ethernet network through said at least one edge bridge to form a transparent LAN services (TLS) instance, said provisioned point to point connections providing a different logical mesh per customer;

assigning to each point to point connection of the TLS instance a VLAN service tag;

configuring said assigned VLAN service tags at each of the three CPEs associated with said TLS instance;

determining, in each of the three CPEs coupled to the at least one edge bridge, a transparent local area network service (TLS) instance association and a configured VLAN service tag for tagging a received Ethernet frame, said configured VLAN service tag based on a media access control (MAC) address of a destination of the Ethernet frame in a different separate customer network portion;

learning and storing, at a first one of said three CPEs, an association of a source MAC address to a specific TLS instance, while avoiding MAC address learning at the at least one edge bridge;

modifying the Ethernet frame to indicate the determined TLS association by adding the configured VLAN service tag; and

utilizing said configured VLAN service tag in said at least one edge bridge to transmit the Ethernet frame based on the determined TLS association to a second one of said three CPEs associated with the destination, without the provider network portion utilizing the destination MAC address.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of determining includes:

determining that a destination MAC address of the Ethernet frame is known to the first one of said three CPEs and adding a service tag indicating a point to point connection till the destination.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of determining includes:

determining that a destination MAC address of the Ethernet frame is unknown to the first one of said three CPEs; and

forwarding said Ethernet frame having an unknown destination MAC address to other CPEs including the second and third ones of said three CPEs associated with the TLS instance over the full mesh of point to point connections.

4. The method according to claim 3 ,

further comprising provisioning a TLS multicast connection in addition to said full mesh;

wherein said step of forwarding includes forwarding frames over the TLS multicast connection.

5. The method of claim 1 ,

wherein the step of determining a configured VLAN service tag includes assigning a unique identifier to identify incoming customer frames; and

configuring a classification rule in each of the three participating CPEs to associate customer frames with a specific TLS instance and service tag;

and further comprising:

composing a forwarding table of configured VLAN service tags and associating each of the configured VLAN service tags in the forwarding table with at least one outgoing NNI port and at least one UNI port.

6. The method of claim 5 ,

further comprising configuring a multi-cast connection TLS service instance; and

wherein the step of configuring a classification rule includes configuring each of the three participating CPEs with a tag per multi-cast connection.

7. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the configured VLAN service tag selected from a hierarchical address range.