Patent ID: 7782790

Claim:
In a network comprising a plurality of routers and links interconnecting the plurality of routers, wherein the plurality of routers communicate using multiprotocol label switching, and wherein a link between two routers may be a link bundle comprising two or more component links, a method of revealing the component links of link bundles in the network, the method comprising: transmitting a sequence of request packets and reply packets along at least one path in the network, the at least one path comprising a series of links in the network, wherein a request packet is configured to request information about links downstream from an origination router of the plurality of routers, wherein the origination router is configured to transmit a request packet having as a destination a predetermined router, and wherein the predetermined router is configured to transmit a reply packet in response to receipt of the request packet, for each router in the plurality of routers that receives a request packet: identifying the received request packet as indicating that link bundles should be revealed; detecting which links connected to the router are link bundles; and for each detected link bundle, adding each component link in the link bundle to a downstream mapping field present in the received request packet and adding a link bundle mapping field to the received request packet, wherein each link bundle mapping field specifies the component links that comprise that link bundle by pointing to the component links added to the downstream mapping field; and for a router in the plurality of routers that is the predetermined router of a received request packet that responds to the received request packet with a reply packet that includes a downstream mapping field and at least one link bundle mapping field: determining if any links identified in the downstream mapping field of the reply packet are component links that belong to a link bundle; for each such determined link, identifying if a link bundle mapping field in the reply packet contains information regarding that link: if not, returning an error message; and if so, processing each component link in the downstream mapping field and iterating through the component links in each link bundle mapping field to ensure each component link in each link bundle mapping field matches the determined links in the downstream mapping field.