Patent ID: 8335162

Claim:
A circuit manager comprising: a probe interface to collect data representative of actual utilization of a network; a usage analyzer to estimate a utilization of the network for a future time interval based on the collected data; a rebalancer to detect a trigger event based on the estimated utilization, and to identify a future virtual circuit path through the network for the future time interval based on the estimated utilization when the trigger event is detected, the probe interface, the usage analyzer and the rebalancer to repetitively change mapping of virtual circuit paths including the future virtual circuit path to physical resources to adapt the network to expected usage conditions; a rerouter to identify the future virtual circuit path based on a first predicted weighted cost for a first communication link and a second predicted weighted cost for a second communication link: and a capacity manager to determine whether the identified future virtual circuit path is not predicted to reduce a future utilization of a communication path below a threshold, and to determine where additional transmission capacity should be added to the network when the predicted future utilization of the communication path is not below the threshold.