Virtualized shared protection capacity
First Claim
1. A network element, comprising:
- a plurality of ports interfacing to a plurality of other network elements; and
a control element coupled to the plurality of ports, wherein the control element is configured to provide dedicated active bandwidth, dedicated protection bandwidth, and shared protection bandwidth at layer one, and to provide virtualized shared protection capacity across a plurality of instance flows over the plurality of ports, wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity comprises the shared protection bandwidth at layer one, and wherein the plurality of instance flows comprise one or more of optical virtual private networks and virtual machines using the virtualized shared protection capacity over the plurality of ports, and wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity comprises its own control plane instance operating at layer one separate from the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth thereby enabling partitioning of the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth into private domains while supporting shared mesh restoration.
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Accused Products
Abstract
The present disclosure relates a network, a network element, a system, and a method providing an efficient allocation of protection capacity for network connections and/or services. These may be for services within a given Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Virtual Machine (VM) instance flow. Network ingress/egress ports are designed to be VM instance aware while transit ports may or may not be depending on network element capability or configuration. A centralized policy management and a distributed control plane are used to discover and allocate resources to and among the VPNs or VM instances. Algorithms for efficient allocation and release of protection capacity may be coordinated between the centralized policy management and the distributed control plane. Additional coupling of attributes such as latency may provide more sophisticated path selection algorithms including efficient sharing of protection capacity.
309 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A network element, comprising:
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a plurality of ports interfacing to a plurality of other network elements; and a control element coupled to the plurality of ports, wherein the control element is configured to provide dedicated active bandwidth, dedicated protection bandwidth, and shared protection bandwidth at layer one, and to provide virtualized shared protection capacity across a plurality of instance flows over the plurality of ports, wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity comprises the shared protection bandwidth at layer one, and wherein the plurality of instance flows comprise one or more of optical virtual private networks and virtual machines using the virtualized shared protection capacity over the plurality of ports, and wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity comprises its own control plane instance operating at layer one separate from the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth thereby enabling partitioning of the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth into private domains while supporting shared mesh restoration. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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11. A network, comprising:
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a plurality of interconnected nodes at layer one, each node comprising a plurality of ports interfacing a plurality of other nodes, and a control element coupled to the plurality of ports, wherein the control element is configured to utilize layer one bandwidth categorized as dedicated active bandwidth, dedicated protection bandwidth, and shared protection bandwidth, wherein virtualized shared protection capacity comprises the shared protection bandwidth; and a signaling and routing protocol operating on the control elements and configured to communicate between the plurality of interconnected nodes to manage and maintain a plurality of instance flows across the plurality of interconnected nodes; wherein the plurality of instance flows comprise one or more of virtual private networks and virtual machines, and wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity is utilized by the virtual private networks or the virtual machines over the plurality of nodes; and wherein the virtualized shared protection capacity comprises its own control plane instance operating at layer one separate from the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth thereby enabling partitioning of the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth into private domains while supporting shared mesh restoration. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19)
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20. A method, comprising:
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from a management platform, defining application and network policies; discovering a physical network; mapping the application and network policies to a hyper virtualizer; from a service application, requesting service from the hyper virtualizer; instantiating a virtual network on the physical network based on the request, wherein the physical network comprises a layer one network, and wherein the layer one network comprises bandwidth categorized as dedicated active bandwidth, dedicated protection bandwidth, and shared protection bandwidth; and providing virtualized protection via the virtual network for the service, wherein virtualized protection capacity comprises the shared protection bandwidth at layer one, and wherein the virtualized protection capacity comprises a pool of restoration capacity at layer one that is utilized by a plurality of independent optical virtual private networks or virtual machines over the physical network, and wherein the virtualized protection capacity comprises its own control plane instance operating at layer one separate from the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth thereby enabling partitioning of the dedicated active bandwidth and the dedicated protection bandwidth into private domains while supporting shared mesh restoration.
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Specification