Patent ID: 7289448

Claim:
A method for selecting ring paths in service provisioning on an optical network, the optical network comprising a plurality of interconnected rings, the method comprising: receiving a request to provision a service between a first end point and a second end point in the optical network; identifying a plurality of possible ring paths between the first end point and the second end point; validating a bandwidth of each ring path, comprising validating bandwidths of bandwidth bottlenecks in each ring path, the bandwidth bottlenecks comprising user ports, midplanes in shelves containing the user ports, and ring interconnects in each ring path; for each ring in each validated ring path, selecting a traffic direction and a channel to be used for each traffic direction; expanding each validated ring path into node hops; and validating a bandwidth of each hop in each expanded ring path; selecting a ring path from the validated ring paths; and provisioning the service on the selected ring path, including provisioning the service through the selected traffic direction and the channel associated with each ring in the selected ring path.