At+t Corp.

Moshe B Rosenwein

Hanan Luss

John Gregory Klincewicz

Mohan Gawande

Romanath Roy

Nicholas Paul De Vito

A method is provided for designing a hierarchical architecture for a synchronous optical network (SONET) given a plurality of demand nodes at which communications traffic originates and at least one destination node at which the communications traffic is collected for transmission to a switch. The method includes the steps of: (a) dividing the plurality of demand nodes into distinct groups of demand nodes; (b) selecting at least one node for each group to serve as a ring hub for connection to a backbone ring; (c) designing a backbone ring topology that includes at least the ring hubs and the destination node; (d) designing an access ring topology for each of the demand node groups so that the backbone ring and access ring topologies constitute a preliminary network topology; (e) evaluating a cost associated with the preliminary network topology; (f) selecting at least one alternative ring hub to provide a new set of ring hubs; (g) repeating steps (c)-(e) for the new set of ring hubs to determine if a resulting network cost estimate is reduced; (h) repeating steps (f)-(g) until a minimum cost network topology is produced. Other aspects of the invention are directed to hub and spoke topology design and SONET transport design.

Growing community of inventors

Long Branch, NJ, United States of America

Moshe B Rosenwein