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US 6,643,464 B1Granted
Constrained optical mesh protection for transmission systems
AssigneeNortel Networks Limited
InventorsPeter Roorda, Nigel Baker, Adrian P Sparks
Life of this patent
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AssigneeNortel Networks Limited
InventorsPeter Roorda, Nigel Baker, Adrian P Sparks
Estimating the term…
To provide improved protection bandwidth efficiency for a fast recovery from a fault in an optical network, a protection ring for sharing between some of the protection paths has a pre-configured route so as to overlap on a given one of the links, with other protection paths or other rings. A selector for the given link selects which of the overlapping secondary paths is allocated to the given link at any time. Thus, two types of sharing of protection paths are combined to achieve more efficient use of protection bandwidth. The link selector can be controlled locally and so can operate more rapidly. The local control, essentially independent of the switches used to set up the secondary path through the network, makes the combination easier to scale to larger, more complex networks than shared rings alone.
An optical network comprising:
A node for use in an optical network, the network comprising a number of other nodes and a plurality of links between the nodes, a mesh of working paths provided over the links and nodes, a plurality of secondary paths provided over the links and nodes, each secondary path for use in case of a failure in a link or node of a working path-associated with such secondary path, some of the secondary paths having pre-determined routing so as to overlap on a shared link of a first shared protection ring, the node being for use at one end of the shared link, and comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.