Patent ID: 8131873

Claim:
A method for selecting one or more Path Computation Elements (PCEs) to compute a path between nodes of a computer network, the method comprising the steps of: receiving dynamic advertisements of path computation capabilities and of available path computation resources of a plurality of PCEs at a Path Computation Client (PCC) in the network, the path computation capabilities describing an ability to compute one or more types of paths and the available path computation resources being internal computation resources that may be employed to compute the one or more types of paths; based on the advertisements, excluding from the plurality of PCEs any PCEs that are incapable of computing a desired type of path to produce a plurality of remaining PCEs; determining a number of path computation requests to be sent from the PCC; when the PCC has a single path computation request to be sent, selecting the one of the plurality of remaining PCEs to service the path computation request of the PCC that has a highest measure of available path computation resources, and issuing the path computation request from the PCC to the selected one of the remaining PCEs; and when the PCC has multiple path computation requests to be sent, determining a ratio between the available computation resources at each of the remaining PCEs, dividing the path computation requests into groups in proportion to the ratio of the available computation resources, and issuing the groups of path computation requests from the PCC to respective ones of the remaining PCEs.