Patent ID: 7602807

Claim:
A method comprising: in response to receiving a request from an entity, determining an amount of bandwidth available for each one of a first plurality of optical links, wherein a network comprises a second plurality of optical links, said determining is performed by a distributed management architecture of said network, said distributed management architecture uses an automatic provisioning protocol, said network further comprises a plurality of nodes, each one of said plurality of nodes is coupled to at least one other of said nodes by at least one of said second plurality of optical links, and said second plurality of optical links comprises said first plurality of optical links; and providing at least a portion of said amount of said bandwidth for said each one of said first plurality of optical links to said entity, if each of said at least said portion of said amount of said bandwidth for said each one of said first plurality of optical links are sufficient to meet a requested amount of bandwidth requested by said request, wherein said automatic provisioning protocol is configured to effect said determining and said providing by virtue of being configured to dynamically provision a virtual path over said first plurality of optical links.