Patent ID: 7054558

Claim:
A method for protecting traffic in a WDM-based ring-topology optical transport network, said network comprising network elements joined by spans, optical paths being defined between said network elements, the method comprising the steps of: i) defining a network architecture; ii) defining configuration data of the network elements; iii) defining criteria triggering the protection mechanism; iv) defining a mechanism state machine and a protocol for exchanging information between the network elements, the protocol comprising a set of messages and both the syntax and semantics thereof; v) defining a method for traffic re-routing; and vi) defining a set of operator commands for network maintenance, wherein said step i) comprises the step of defining a network wherein the whole capacity is evenly split between working capacity and protection capacity; said step ii) comprises the steps of providing each network element with a ring network map, a traffic map with path characteristics and bit rate of each path; said step iii) comprises the step of considering as triggering criteria the defects at OMS section level or the network element failures; said step iv) comprises the step of defining as state machine and protocol fundamentally those described in ITU-T G.841; and said step vi) comprises the step of defining as operator commands those described in ITU-T G.841, wherein the terms and concepts which are specific for SDH transmissions are replaced by those corresponding to OTN networks.