Enterprise interworking typically involves the establishment of end-to-end connectivity among sites of an enterprise (or site) over a “wired” infrastructure. This type of connectivity has been traditionally enabled through various routing protocols, such as open shortest path first (OSPF), routing information protocol (RIP), border gateway protocol (BGP), and the like. Depending on the types of underlying networks, the operation of these routing protocols may be different but, in all cases, each protocol seeks to achieve the propagation of reachability information among interconnected sites so as to establish direct end-to-end connectivity between the sites. For security purposes, enterprises also seek to establish this direct end-to-end connectivity through private networking services. Typically, this capability is offered through addressing and routing techniques, such as multiprotocol label switching, virtual private networking (MPLS/VPN) services, which essentially enable service providers to logically partition their networks—using, for example, virtual routing and forwarding (VRF)—to permit sites with overlapping internet protocol (IP) addressing to share the same physical networking infrastructures, but maintain privacy through logical networking virtualization techniques.
As wireless networking capabilities continue evolve and offer increased reliability and throughput, enterprises are increasingly considering wireless connectivity as a potential source of both primary and secondary access to their enterprise (or private) networks. As such, suitable wireless interconnecting networks must be able to support the aforementioned direct end-to-end connectivity, as well as enable private networking services. Unfortunately, network virtualization and the ability to support multiple enterprises having overlapping or identical IP addressing spaces have been limited to the “wired” domains.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that extends private enterprise networking to wireless interconnecting domains.