Patent ID: 8446841

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a link-state advertisement at a core network element of a network; determining whether a neighboring network element is an edge network element or a core network element; if the neighboring network element is an edge network element of the same network as the core network element: setting a filter; removing traffic engineering information from the link-state advertisement according to the filter to yield remaining information, the traffic engineering information comprising information used in the network to build a traffic engineering database, the traffic engineering information comprising one or more of the following types of information: a traffic engineering metric, a hop value, a maximum bandwidth, a maximum reservable bandwidth, an unreserved bandwidth, delay, and a resource class; sending the remaining information to the neighboring network element; receiving a request for a path calculation at the core network element from the edge network element, the edge network element lacking a path calculating ability; performing the path calculation at the core network element using the traffic engineering information; and sending results of the path calculation to the edge network element.