Tellabs Operations, Inc.

Coriant Operations, Inc.

Anoop John Mathew

Bradley Ronald Kangas

Mark A Richmond

James N Turner

Kenneth S Mizialko

Jai Harpalani

Jonathan B Sadler

Weiying Cheng

Thomas J Huber

Embodiments including methods, systems, and apparatuses for distributing, processing, and reacting to path information distributed via a service-agnostic packet fabric for the purpose of enabling path selection are disclosed. By configuring two ingress line cards to send path quality words to each other via the switch fabric, compare the path quality words, and determine whether to transmit traffic to an egress line card via the switch fabric based on the comparison of the path quality words, the embodiments enable a central switch fabric to be unaware of the paths that it carries, and enable both ingress and egress bandwidth of the switch fabric to be sized according to the facilities for which it is terminating. The switch fabric does not need to support working and protection paths simultaneously in some embodiments, allowing it to be scaled appropriately to termination facilities.

Methods and apparatuses for path selection in a packet network

The embodiments disclosed herein provide a mechanism for sharing protection resources in an arbitrary network topology involving pre-computing the protection resources so that data-plane-based protection can be used to activate the protection resources upon detection of a failure, thus, providing faster switching times than typical control-plane-based solutions. This is accomplished by configuring a mesh network to include, for a working path in the network, one or more protection paths with the same end nodes as the working path, where each protection path includes at least one intermediate node that is not part of the working path. The intermediate node accepts a protection request from one of the end nodes and determines whether a local resource for a protection path is available. If the local resource is available, the intermediate node forwards the protection request along the protection path, but, if the local resource is unavailable, the intermediate node notifies the end node from which the protection request originated that the protection path is unavailable.

Architecture and protection method for mesh protection of N services with M shared resources

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Woodridge, IL, United States of America

Anoop John Mathew