Patent ID: 7209659

Claim:
A scalable communication network for establishing full connectivity between a plurality of points of presence (POP), comprising: a plurality K of access routers, each for consolidating data received from one or more access networks/nodes over a plurality of trunks, said access router being a packet router; a transport network of a plurality M of core nodes, each core node connected to the remaining (M−1) of said core nodes by (M−1) core links, and connected with an access router via one of said trunks, each said core node including: an optical cross-connect with a connectivity map for connecting (M−1) points and N×(M−1) ports bi-directionally, each point communicating with a respective trunk; and a plurality N of switching modules S 1 to S N , each connected to a plurality (M−1) of said ports, said optical cross-connect and said core nodes forming plurality N of virtual parallel plane (VPP) network.