Patent ID: 8089980

Claim:
A method for protection switching of geographically separate switching systems arranged in pairs, comprising: providing a pair of switching systems which are geographically separate and which supply a dedicated redundancy to each other, one of the pair of switching systems is in an active operating state and the other is in a hot-standby operating state; controlling the communication between the each of the pair switching system and a monitoring unit in accordance with the an operating state of the respective switching system; when a loss of the communication to the switching system in the active operating state occurs: activating, by the monitoring unit, the switching system in the hot-standby operating state to be in the active operating state, and deactivating, by the monitoring unit, the switching system with the communication loss to be in the hot-standby operating state, wherein when in the hot-standby operating state, the respective switching system is not active in terms of switching functions; and further features: periodically sending an IP lease request to the monitoring unit by a packet-based interface of the switching system in the hot-standby operating state, the packet-based interface is in an inactive state.