Patent 7983255 was granted and assigned to Avaya on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A second VLAN tag is prepended to a packet prepended with a first VLAN tag when the packet is forwarded from a first port to a second port to result in an Q-in-Q packet. The second port has output connected to input of a third port. A third VLAN tag is prepended to the Q-in-Q packet when the Q-in-Q packet is forwarded from the third port to a fourth port to result in an Q-in-Q-in-Q packet.