Patent ID: 8023405

Claim:
A method of activating circuits in telecommunications networks comprising: preplanning circuits in a network, and distributing local definition data defining connections between sections of the preplanned circuits to network members; the local definition data comprising data pairs each associated with a respective index, wherein a first element of a data pair defines a cross-connection in the network member to a subsequent circuit section to be activated, and wherein a second element of the data pair defines an index that corresponds to a next data pair in a subsequent network member disposed along the path of the circuit section to be activated, and wherein the next data pair is to be employed to connect to another subsequent section of the circuit to be activated; receiving, at a network member, an activation message comprising an index addressing an indexed data pair stored in memory at the network member; activating a circuit based on the first element in the data pair addressed by the index; replacing the index in the activation message with the second element in the data pair; and propagating the activation message comprising the replaced index in cascade between remaining network members in a preplanned circuit to activate the preplanned circuit, the activation message being propagated in frames circulating through the network to activate connections between sections of the preplanned circuit as defined by the local definition data previously distributed to the network members.