This application discloses a communication method and a related apparatus, and relates to the field of communication technologies. The method is applied to a
software defined
wide area network (SD-WAN)
overlay network. A customer premise equipment (CPE) autonomously generates an SD-WAN
overlay routing table, so that communication reliability and flexibility are improved. A
route reflector (RR) specifies an
overlay multicast reverse path forwarding (RPF)
route to the CPE to implement SD-WAN overlay
multicast communication, and the CPE does not need to perform path computation autonomously, so that a computing power requirement of the CPE is reduced. An identifier of the CPE and an identifier of
a site are carried in a
multicast join message to implement the SD-WAN overlay
multicast communication. A standard IP header is carried in a multicast service packet to implement the SD-WAN overlay
multicast communication, so that generalization, applicability, and compatibility are improved.