Patent ID: 7899326

Claim:
A method for communicating cross-connection information within an optical network, by use of wavelength information, comprising the steps of: abstracting cross-connection information of at least one node in the optical network to produce wavelength reachability information corresponding to a Traffic Engineering (TE) link; the wavelength reachability information describes cross-connection constraint between a first TE link and a second TE link and reachability between all wavelengths of the first TE link and all wavelengths of the second TE link on the same device; distributing the wavelength reachability information of the at least one node in the optical network by utilizing a Link-State Advertisement (LSA) of an open shortest path first (OSPF) protocol; the wavelength reachability information comprises number of TE links reachable by a TE link, index of each reachable TE link, number of reachable wavelengths of each reachable TE link and value of each reachable wavelength; and updating the wavelength reachability information, when boards are added or removed, or when internal fiber connections are changed.