Patent ID: 8630164

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a database to store a tunnel state for a first traffic engineering tunnel; a signaling engine to establish, via a processor, a label switch path identifier for the first traffic engineering tunnel using a signaling protocol session and to detect whether a failure in the signaling protocol session has occurred by analyzing messages exchanged in accordance with the same signaling protocol session that is used to establish the label switch path identifier for the first traffic engineering tunnel, and to change the tunnel state from a first logic state to a second logic state when the failure in the signaling protocol session is detected, wherein the signaling protocol session is a label distribution protocol session; and a label switching engine to route data through a multiprotocol label switching-based network via a second traffic engineering tunnel when the tunnel state is the second logic state, and to route the data through the multiprotocol label switching-based network via the first traffic engineering tunnel when the tunnel state is the first logic state.