Method and apparatus for allocating working and protection bandwidth in a telecommunications mesh network

• US 20020194339A1
• Filed: 05/15/2002
• Published: 12/19/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 05/16/2001
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Tellabs Operations Incorporated (Infinera Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Tellabs Operations Incorporated (Infinera Corp.)
• Inventors: Lin, Philip J., Mills, James D., Chow, Timothy Y.
• Application Number:
  US10/146,212
• Publication Number:
  US 20020194339A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/226
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0896 Bandwidth or capacity management, i.e. automatically increasing or decreasing capacities flow or congestion control using dynamic resource allocation, e.g. in-call renegotiation, H04L47/76
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/00 Routing or path finding of packets in data switching networks routing or path finding in wireless networks H04W40/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/22 Alternate routing
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/28 using route fault recovery
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/15 in relation to multipoint traffic arrangements for broadcast or multicast in data networks H04L12/18
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/70 Admission control; Resource allocation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/728 for backup paths
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/746 Reaction triggered by a failure
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/824 Applicable to portable or mobile terminals

Abstract

The present invention relates, by way of illustration, to a telecommunications network that includes a collection of geographically dispersed network elements, called nodes, connected by communication links (e.g., fiber, wireless links). The topology of the network may be an arbitrary mesh. This information may be represented by a graph. For each pair of nodes in the network, a pair of node-disjoint paths between the nodes of minimum total length is computed. One path of each pair is designated to be the working path and the other is designated to be a protection path. Each time there is a traffic demand to be routed on the network from one node A to another node B, the required amount of bandwidth to support the demand is allocated on the working path between A and B. Bandwidth is also allocated along the protection path. To determine how much protection bandwidth is needed on a particular link L, each failure scenario is simulated, the amount of bandwidth on link L would be needed for restoring traffic under that scenario is computed, and then just enough bandwidth on L to handle the worst-case failure scenario is allocated. According to an embodiment of the present invention, a computer may be used to achieve the simulation, computation, and allocation.

Claims

1. A method of determining a bandwidth for a link in a mesh network, comprising:

determining a support bandwidth required to support a failure in a link in the mesh network;

determining from the support bandwidth a worst-case bandwidth; and

designating the worst-case bandwidth as the bandwidth.