Patent ID: 7408881

Claim:
A method of routing virtually-concatenated data traffic in a network comprising a plurality of nodes, the method comprising, for a given traffic demand to be routed from a source node to a destination node in the network, the steps of: determining an initial candidate path set satisfying a differential delay constraint by arranging a plurality of paths in order of increasing delay and selecting a particular subset of the plurality of paths as the initial candidate set; determining if the initial candidate path set is able to support a bandwidth requirement of the traffic demand; if the initial candidate path set is able to support the bandwidth requirement of the traffic demand, utilizing the initial candidate path set to route the traffic demand; and otherwise repeating the determining steps for one or more additional iterations, with a different candidate path set satisfying the differential delay constraint being selected for a given additional iteration by application of a sliding-window function to the plurality of paths arranged in order of increasing delay, until a different candidate path satisfying the differential delay constraint is determined to support the bandwidth requirement of the traffic demand, and utilizing that candidate path set to route the traffic demand; wherein if the initial candidate path set includes a path P 1 with delay d 1 , and the differential delay constraint is given by δ, only those of the ordered plurality of paths having delays less than or equal to d 1 +δ are selected as members of the initial candidate path set.