Patent ID: 7525989

Claim:
A system comprising: a switch fabric comprising a plurality of ports; a plurality of SONET framers, each SONET framer being coupled to a port of the switch fabric; and a circuit controller at a source node to transmit data to a destination node in a SONET network, and coupled to at least one of the SONET framers, the circuit controller comprising: logic to initiate an allocation of one or more time slots in SONET links coupled between the source node and the destination node to provision a SONET circuit between the source and destination nodes, wherein a data transmission capacity of each said SONET link corresponds to the number of said time slots allocated to said each SONET link, each of said time slots being allocated to a distinct service or process; and logic to initiate transmission of a time slot status message to one or more nodes in the SONET network which are not in the provisioned SONET circuit, the time slot status message identifying at least one allocated time slot within said provisioned SONET circuit, said time slot status message including a Ring ID field, a time slot field, a status field and at least one node field.