Patent ID: 7623446

Claim:
A method of constructing a virtual ring from a plurality of nodes in a packet network, the method comprising the steps of: defining a community of interest by selecting nodes from an interconnected mesh of nodes in the packet network; determining inter-node connectivity for each node in the community of interest with respect to all other nodes in the community of interest; computing an optimal virtual ring to connect all the nodes in the community of interest; advertising ring labels to all nodes in the community of interest; determining neighboring nodes in the community of interest for each node in the community of interest and selecting east and west labels for the neighboring nodes from a set of advertisements received at each node in the community of interest, wherein the step of determining east and west labels comprises the step of first determining eastbound and westbound directions according to a lowest BGP next hop identifier and its closest next hop identifier; and instantiating the ring labels in respective forwarding tables for each node in the community of interest to enable efficient forwarding of data packets to nodes in the community of interest.