Patent ID: 7453796

Claim:
A method of designing a protection capacity to be reserved in a network, the method comprising the steps of: obtaining link capacities associated with a network topology and existing working traffic in the network; and determining capacity partitions for links in the network topology, each of at least a portion of the capacity partitions comprising a protection capacity portion and a working capacity portion that equals or exceeds the existing working traffic on a corresponding link, such that upon a failure on the link, the working traffic on the link is rerouted over a pre-provisioned detour path using the protection capacity portion on one or more links on the detour path, wherein the capacity partition determination step protects existing working traffic in the network, further wherein the capacity partition determining step further comprises: (i) determining a capacity partition in accordance with a spanning tree based methodology that computes a maximum spanning tree based on a maximum protection capacity of a link; (ii) setting the working capacity of a cross link to the minimum of the maximum protection capacity of the links, that are part of the maximum spanning tree, in a detour path associated with a given link to ensure that the one or more links, that are part of the maximum spanning tree, in the detour path have sufficient protection capacity to protect the given link upon failure; and (iii) boosting capacity in one or more cross links, that are not part of the maximum spanning tree, to ensure that one or more unprotected links, that are part of the maximum spanning tree, in the detour path associated with the given link are now protected.