Patent ID: 6976087

Claim:
A method comprising: identifying network elements at endpoints of a data connection channel; generating a candidate path between the network elements at the endpoints; validating the candidate path by determining whether the candidate path provides at least a service requirement based on a service description describing at least one of: minimum bandwidth that is to be guaranteed for each data connection, maximum bandwidth to which each data connection is constrained, maximum delay that packets in a data connection are allowed to tolerate, maximum jitter that a data connection is allowed to tolerate, minimum reliability that each data connection is to be provided, inclusion of network elements capable of acting as security gateways that bracket untrusted sections of the candidate path, reachability, and data collection capability to be instantiated between network locations when the service is in use, and configuring network elements along a validated candidate path to implement the service requirement; and identifying a change in a routing table entry; identifying data connection channels provisioned on a data link connected to an interface referenced by the routing table entry prior to the change; for each data connection channel provisioned on the data link, identifying whether the data connection channel is affected by the change; for each data connection affected by the change, de-provisioning the data connection channel affected by the change; for each data connection channel affected by the change, re-provisioning the data connection channel affected by the change; reserving a predetermined percentage of bandwidth for each direction of a data link, wherein reserving the predetermined percentage of bandwidth is to provide room for manually deployed services, provide a buffer to accommodate unanticipated network traffic, and provide a buffer to accommodate one of an imprecisely understood behavior and an imprecise bandwidth control in a router feeding of a data link; and determining an effective bandwidth capacity of the data link by subtracting the reserve bandwidth from an available bandwidth associated with the data link.