Patent ID: 8374078

Claim:
A method comprising: collecting, at a centralized fault management system, data related to a transport failure in a first path of a packet-switched network used to establish a first pseudo-wire connection between at least two devices, wherein the data is collected by at least one of (i) polling components in the packet-switched network and (ii) communicating with network probes deployed in the packet-switched network; determining, at the centralized fault management system, one or more user network interface (UNI) ports that are affected by the transport failure based on network topology information, wherein the one or more UNI ports are used to connect the at least two devices to the packet-switched network, and wherein the UNI ports are associated with an Ethernet Access Domain in the packet-switched network between responsibilities of a service provider network and responsibilities of a subscriber network; and sending, from the centralized fault management system, one or more messages to one or more network devices on which the affected UNI ports reside based on the transport failure in the first path, wherein the one or more network devices are configured to, responsive to receiving the one or more messages, disable one or more of the affected UNI ports, and wherein the one or more network devices are further configured to switch over to a backup pseudo-wire connection upon disabling the affected UNI ports, comprising: identifying one or more different UNI ports on the one or more network devices for use in establishing the backup pseudo-wire connection, wherein the one or more different UNI ports are maintained in an inactive state while the first pseudo-wire connection is active; and triggering a switch over of traffic on the first pseudo-wire connection to the backup pseudo-wire connection using the identified one or more different UNI ports to maintain the connection between the at least two devices, and wherein the one or more of the affected UNI ports and the one or more different UNI ports are included in one or more user-facing provider edges that form a connection to customer edge devices maintained by one or more subscribers.