Patent ID: 7116905

Claim:
A node for an open ring optical network, comprising; a transport element operable to drop an ingress optical supervisory channel (OSC) signal from a ring transport signal, to passively add local traffic to the ring transport signal, to passively drop local traffic from the ring transport signal and to add an egress OSC signal to the ring transport signal, the transport element comprising: a drop OSC filter operable to drop the ingress OSC signal from the ring transport signal; an add OSC filter operable to add the egress OSC signal to the ring transport signal; and a ring switch disposed between the drop and add OSC filters, the ring switch operable to selectively open the ring in the node; and a managing element operable to receive and process the ingress OSC signal and to generate the egress OSC signal, the managing element further operable to loop back an ingress OSC signal from one of the rings as an egress OSC signal on the other one of the rings.