Patent ID: 7652986

Claim:
A method of routing virtually-concatenated data traffic in a network comprising a plurality of nodes, the plurality of nodes including one or more nodes that are differential delay enabled and one or more nodes that are not differential delay enabled, the method comprising, for a given traffic demand to be routed from a source node to a destination node in the network, the steps of: determining at least one route for routing the demand between an intermediate node that is differential delay enabled and one of the source node and the destination node that is not differential delay enabled; and determining a set of routes for routing the demand between the intermediate node that is differential delay enabled and at least one other node of the network, each of the routes in the set corresponding to a member of a virtually-concatenated group; wherein a given unit of flow within the given traffic demand is routed from the source node to the destination node over both a first route and a second route, the first route being within the at least one route and the second route being within the set of routes.