Patent ID: 9660758
Date: 2017-05-23
CPC Classifications: H04J

Claim:
1. An optical communication network comprising: a plurality of nodes connected to each other by means of optical fibres in a ring structure and client ports comprising a client port transceiver unit, the client port transceiver unit comprising: a working tunable transceiver having a tunable working laser generating an optical signal at a working wavelength transported in said ring structure in a first direction, wherein said working tunable transceiver is connected to an optical multiplex section of a reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer, and a protection tunable transceiver having a tunable protection laser generating an optical signal at a protection wavelength transported in said ring structure in a second direction, wherein said second direction is opposite to the first direction in said ring structure, wherein for each node at least two wavelength assignment tables are provided, a first wavelength assignment table is provided for connection failures caused by fibre breaks and a second wavelength assignment table is provided for connection failures caused by client port transceiver units, wherein to each working wavelength a corresponding protection wavelength is assigned, wherein in case of a detected connection failure in said ring structure each node which loses at least one connection performs for all working wavelengths affected by said connection failure a lookup in its wavelength assignment tables to determine a respective protection wavelength and tunes the tunable protection laser of the client port transceiver unit to the determined protection wavelength, wherein said optical communication network is based on at least one of a bidirectional 2-Fibre (2F) wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) ring, colorless reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), tunable interfaces and lasers, wherein said protection tunable transceiver is connected to the optical multiplex section of the reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer only in the event of a failure, wherein said at least two wavelength assignment tables are derived automatically from a traffic matrix indicating logical data connections of client ports in said optical communication network, and wherein said traffic matrix is generated by a master node of said optical communication network by performing a topology discovery of the network to generate a topology table and then performing a service discovery to generate the traffic matrix.