What is the advantage of using a router instead of a switch when implementing Hierarchical VPLS (H- VPLS) CE devices?

When a router acts as the CE device in H-VPLS, it terminates Layer 2 traffic and presents only its own MAC address to the provider edge (PE) router. All MAC addresses belonging to customer devices behind the CE router are invisible to the PE, preventing MAC table exhaustion on PE devices and allowing the VPLS service to scale across large multi-site deployments.

Using a router as a CE device introduces additional routing layers and is not inherently easier to troubleshoot than a switch-based CE configuration.

While Layer 3 ECMP is technically possible with a router CE, this is not the primary or defining advantage of using a router over a switch in H-VPLS design.

The full-mesh requirement is a scalability limitation of standard flat VPLS that H-VPLS was designed to solve - it describes the problem being addressed, not the specific advantage that a router CE provides.