VIRTUAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE FOR CONNECTIONLESS LAN BACKBONE

摘要

Network traffic management is achieved based on automatically setting up a plurality (127, 128) of virtual networks (VNETs) within a single large virtual LAN. Multicast/broadcast traffic is confined to the VNET (127, 128) of the source, without imposing constraints on layer two addressing within the virtual LAN. VNETs are domains of users of a virtual LAN which include members of logical networks defined at layer three or higher. One method includes transferring a multi-destination packet originating from a particular node in the virtual LAN by tunnelling across a connectionless backbone network (120) to a virtual net server (125). The virtual net server (125) translates the multi-destination packet to a plurality of tunneled messages identifying nodes authorized to receive multi-destination packets from the members of the particular VNET which originated the packet. The tunneled messages are then forwarded from the virtual net server to the authorized nodes.