Patent ID: 7330428

Claim:
A switching method for a grooming switch having at least three switching stages comprising first, middle and last switch stages, the method comprising: accumulating a list of connection requests which cannot be granted given currently granted connection assignments, said requests for connecting inputs of the first switch stage to outputs of the last switch stage; and at a designated time, for each request in said list: dynamically building a first data structure that, for each output of a first switch slice of the middle stage, records a first value representing a configured input of the first switch slice that is currently assigned to said output, dynamically building a second data structure that records, for each output of the first switch slice of the middle stage, a second value representing an output of a second switch slice of said middle stage that is connected to an input of the second switch slice corresponding to said configured input of the first switch slice, and assigning connections to satisfy the stored unassigned requests, by reassigning existing connection assignments using the values recorded in the first and the second data structures.