Patent ID: 7289450

Claim:
A method for establisning a communications path between a source network element (NE) and a destination NE, comprising: (a) defining flooding scope stages including respective groups of NEs for use in establishing said communications path, each flooding scope stage including NEs providing at least one potential path between said source NE and said destination NE, said flooding scope stages comprising a first group of NEs and a second group of NEs having at least one NE not associated with the first group of NEs; (b) contemporaneously determining available resources within each of the NEs of said first group of NEs; (c) contemporaneously reserving those available resources appropriate to establish said communications path; (d) selecting reserved resources sufficient to establish said communications path; (e) releasing those reserved resources not selected; and (f) in the absence of available resources sufficient to establish said communications path, repeating steps (b)-(e) using the second group of NEs.