Patent ID: 7606237

Claim:
A mesh data network comprising: two or more nodes; two or more links interconnecting the nodes; and a network manager adapted to control reservation of protection bandwidth for the links, wherein: a first link in the network is part of two or more protection paths, each protection path corresponding to a different primary path; the network manager is adapted to determine how much protection bandwidth to reserve on the first link for the two or more protection paths, wherein the protection bandwidth reserved on the first link is shared between the protection paths of the two or more primary paths, such that the amount of protection bandwidth reserved on the first link is less than the sum of the bandwidths of the two or more primary paths; a source node of a primary path is adapted to generate and insert failure detection (FD) packets into the primary path; a destination node of the primary path is adapted to monitor the arrival of FD packets; the destination node is adapted to register a failure on the primary path when no FD packets arrive during a specified interval of time; and one or more of the FD packets are marked in such a way that the marked packets are treated with relatively high priority in one or more of scheduling and buffer management at one or more of the nodes along the primary path.