RFCs 4761 and 4762 describe a solution for Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) multicast that relies on the use of point-to-point or multipoint-to-point unicast Label Switched Paths (LSPs) for carrying multicast traffic. This solution has certain limitations for certain VPLS multicast traffic profiles. For example, it may result in highly non-optimal bandwidth utilization when a large amount of multicast traffic is to be transported.

This document describes solutions for overcoming a subset of the limitations of the existing VPLS multicast solution. It describes procedures for VPLS multicast that utilize multicast trees in the service provider (SP) network. The solution described in this document allows sharing of one such multicast tree among multiple VPLS instances. Furthermore, the solution described in this document allows a single multicast tree in the SP network to carry traffic belonging only to a specified set of one or more IP multicast streams from one or more VPLS instances.