US Patent 9742678 E-tree service with optimal forwarding in EVPN

In one embodiment, when an ingress provider edge (PE) device of a computer network domain receives a frame at the ingress PE device destined to a destination media access control (MAC) address, it can determine whether the frame was received on a root or leaf Ethernet ingress segment, and also whether the destination MAC address is located via a root or leaf Ethernet segment. Accordingly, the ingress PE device may either drop or forward the frame based on the ingress Ethernet segment and destination MAC address Ethernet segment being either a root or a leaf, respectively.