Patent ID: 7940777

Claim:
A method, comprising: establishing a label switched path (LSP) by sending an LSP label from an ingress router to an egress router, wherein the egress router is more than one hop away from the ingress router; receiving a packet from a source node in the ingress router; classifying the received packet in the ingress router as a first packet type or a second packet type; when the packet is the first packet type, forwarding the packet to a next hop; and when the packet is the second packet type: performing forward error correction (FEC) encoding on the packet to generate repair data; modifying the packet by adding a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) header to indicate that the packet is to be forwarded on the LSP, wherein the LSP is protected using FEC that is based on the performed FEC encoding; generating an additional MPLS packet carrying the repair data; and transmitting from the ingress router, the modified packet and the additional packet on the LSP to the egress router.