In the upstream direction, the ingress IOM receiving the GRE tunneled packets from the Wi-Fi AP or AC, load-balances tunnel processing amongst the set of MS-ISAs on the active WLAN-GW IOMs in the WLAN-GW group. The load-balancing is based on a hash of source IP address in the outer IP header. The MS-ISA receiving the GRE encapsulated packets removes the tunnel encapsulation, and internally tunnels (MAC-in-MAC, using BVPLS) the packet to an anchor MS-ISA on the WLAN-GW IOM. All traffic from a specific UE is always forwarded to the same anchor MS-ISA based on hashing on UE’s MAC address. The MS-ISA provides a mobility anchor point for the UE. The UE MAC’s association to the GRE tunnel identifier is created or updated. The corresponding IOM provides ESM functions including ESM lookup, ingress ACLs and QoS. DHCP packets are forwarded to the CPM from the anchor IOM.
In the downstream direction, the IP packets are forwarded as normal from the network IOM (based on route lookup yielding subscriber subnet) to the IOM where the ESM host is anchored. ESM processing including per UE hierarchical policing and LI is performed on the anchor IOM. Configured MTU on the group-interface is enforced on the IOM, and if required packets are fragmented. The packets are then forwarded to the appropriate anchor MS-ISA housed by this IOM. Lookup based on UE’s MAC address is performed to get the tunnel identification, and the packets are MAC-in-MAC tunneled to the MS-ISA terminating the GRE tunnel. Aggregate shaping on the tunneled traffic (per tunnel or per retailer) is performed on the carrier IOM housing the tunnel termination MS-ISA. The tunnel termination MS-ISA removes MAC-in-MAC encapsulation, and GRE encapsulates the Layer 2 packet, which exits on the Layer 3 SAP to the carrier IOM. The GRE tunneled packet is forwarded to the right access IOM toward the Wi-Fi AP-based on a routing lookup on IP DA in the outer header.