Patent ID: 7746793

Claim:
A method for assuring availability of Fast Reroute protection for an MPLS Traffic Engineering LSP, said method comprising: at a selected router along said MPLS traffic engineering LSP, verifying forwarding state of a Fast Reroute tunnel, wherein verifying forwarding state comprises: forwarding a verification packet over said LSP to the end of the LSP to verify operation of the forwarding plane, wherein forwarding comprises utilizing a forwarding table associated with a forwarding plane and used to forward traffic on said LSP; if a response to said verification packet is received, setting a protection status verified bit in a control plane message; if a response to said verification packet is not received, detecting corrupted forwarding state along said LSP; and if said verifying detects corrupted forwarding state along said Fast Reroute tunnel, rerouting said Fast Reroute tunnel and notifying a head-end router of said MPLS Traffic Engineering LSP corrupted forwarding state.