Patent ID: 7340169

Claim:
A method comprising: dynamically discovering an available lightpath route comprising a concatenation of a plurality of lightpath segments connected via respective nodes along a route spanning from a source edge node to a destination edge node and including at least one switching node in an optical switched network; generating a lightpath reservation message containing an explicit route corresponding to the available lightpath route that was discovered and a scheduled time slot during which network resources are to be reserved; and reserving resources along the explicit route to enable transmission of data between the source and destination nodes along the explicit route during the scheduled time slot, wherein reservation of the resources causes said at least one switching node and the source and destination edge nodes to be configured so as to form a virtual optical-switched circuit between the source and destination edge nodes during the scheduled time slot, wherein dynamically discovering the available lightpath route includes: maintaining a routing table at the source edge node containing a list of potential lightpath routes that may be used to reach the destination edge node; maintaining link availability information at the source edge node corresponding to an availability of link and node resources in the optical switched network; selecting a lightpath route from the routing table for which a lightpath reservation during a scheduled time slot is to be made; and verifying sufficient resources are available to support the lightpath reservation based on the link availability information, wherein verifying sufficient resources includes: identifying the switching nodes along the lightpath route; and for each switching node, aggregating any existing reservations for a node resource of the switching node corresponding to a specified bandwidth and the scheduled time slot to obtain an existing resource allocation, adding a bandwidth percentage corresponding to a resource reservation request to the existing resource allocation to obtain a requested allocation for the node resource, and determining if the requested allocation exceeds a threshold.