CPC H04L 12/4633 (2013.01) [H04L 45/50 (2013.01); H04L 45/66 (2013.01); H04L 2212/00 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |
1. A method, comprising:
receiving, at a virtual gateway network element (GNE) on a cross-media device and under control of a first entity, a packet from a first level two (L2) media type network for transmission to a second L2 media type network under control of a second entity, wherein the first L2 media type network and the second L2 media type network are incompatible for direct packet transmission;
removing, at the virtual GNE, Ethernet encapsulation from the packet by replacing the Ethernet encapsulation with a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tag and adding Connectionless-mode Network Protocol (CLNP) information to the packet;
re-encapsulating, at a first network device located between the virtual GNE and a packet network, the packet in a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) encapsulation;
forwarding, over the packet network, the packet from the first network device to a digital communication channel (DCC) on a second network device, wherein the DCC is associated with the second L2 media type network, wherein the packet network is between the first network device and the second network device;
replacing, at the DCC on the second network device, the MPLS encapsulation with a Link Access Protocol (LAP) encapsulation; and
transmitting the packet encapsulated with the LAP encapsulation to the second L2 media type network.
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