Patent ID: 7290043

Claim:
A telecommunications system comprising: a network; S switches running PNNI protocol in communication through the network, where S is an integer greater than or equal to 3, each switch having a plurality of logical nodes contained within a PNNI peer group, each switch having a system capabilities information group which allow the switch to store proprietary information without affecting the switches to interoperate, and a nodal information information group which has information about a particular logical node, all nodes in the peer group have a nodal information information group from every other logical node in the peer group, each switch having a topology database with all configuration information of the S switches, any one switch providing all the configuration information for all of the S switches by attaching a system capabilities information group to a nodal information information group, the configuration information includes a name of the switch, an IP address of the switch, a software version of the switch, and hardware type of the switch, the switches send configuration information to each other, the switches send SNMP queries to each other to return retrieved configuration information from each other, and the switches respond to the SNMP queries by sending the requested configuration information to the other switches which sent the SNMP queries.