Patent ID: 7233567

Claim:
A method for facilitating establishment of a bridge between a working port and a protection port for supporting multiple traffic redundancy mechanisms in a networking device to preserve a communication path in a network, the method comprising: establishing a resource manager for managing the multiple traffic redundancy mechanisms; establishing a protection group including a working port and a protection port by the resource manager; establishing an agent for the working port by the resource manager; maintaining handlers for the working port by the agent; detecting a failure that affects traffic on a path associated with the working port; and cloning the path by: maintaining routes associated with the working port in memory; employing the routes to establish a traffic bridge between the working port and the protection port; and switching traffic from the working port to the protection port over the traffic bridge by the resource manager and the agent according to a predetermined redundancy mechanism for the protection group such that the communication path is unaltered in a forwarding table of an upstream line card and remains usable from the perspective of that upstream line card.