Patent ID: 8705345

Claim:
A method for jointly protecting a plurality of link disjoint paths between senders and receivers in a communications network against failures without rerouting data around a link or a node failure, the method comprising: sending data units by the senders over working paths in the communications network; applying network coding to form a combination of data units from a plurality of the senders; sending the combination of the data units over a backup circuit of the communications network; if one or more failures occur resulting in loss of one or more of the data units, then recovering at the receivers the one or more of the data units from the combination of data units sent over the backup circuit of the communications network and the data units received over non-failed working paths; and wherein the backup circuit thereby provides protection for the working paths by providing 100 percent protection against single link failure on any of the working paths without rerouting data around the link or the node failure.