Patent ID: 7715309

Claim:
A network management system (NMS), comprising a controller that manages a communications interface, wherein the controller is programmed to: establish between first and second customer edge (CE) routers in a full mesh packet network a first logical data tunnel conforming to an isolation protocol; establish between the first and second CE routers a second logical data tunnel conforming to the isolation protocol; determine which of the first and second logical data tunnels has a lower end-to-end packet transmission latency; direct one or more routers associated with the determined one of the first and second logical data tunnels having the lowest packet transmission latency to buffer packet transmissions to synchronize packet data, transport in the first and second logical data tunnels; enable packet data exchanges between the first and second CE routers over the first logical data tunnel as a primary transport; direct the first and second CE routers to duplicate the packet data exchanged between them over the second logical data tunnel; and direct the first and second CE routers to synchronously switch to the second logical data tunnel as the primary transport of packet data upon detecting a fault in the first logical data tunnel.