Patent ID: 7317731

Claim:
A system for distributed resource reservation protocol-traffic engineering (RSVP-TE) hitless graceful restart for a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network, the system comprising: a plurality of ingress cards and egress cards, each ingress card and each egress card having an MPLS control plane forwarding table for reverse and forward traffic outgoing and incoming labels for Label Switched Paths in the MPLS network; a plurality of ingress card data planes and egress card data planes, each ingress card data plane and each egress card data plane having said forwarding table stored thereon; and a means for providing messaging comprising: means, at each ingress card MPLS control plane, for providing Hello messages for detecting a restart status of any egress card MPLS control plane; means for searching, updating, and binding the forwarding table stored on each ingress card data plane; and means for searching, updating, and binding forwarding tables stored on each egress card MPLS control plane; and means, at each egress card MPLS control plane, for providing Hello messages for detecting a restart status of any ingress card MPLS control plane; means for searching, updating, and binding the forwarding table stored on each egress card data plane; and means for searching, updating, and binding the forwarding tables stored on each ingress card MPLS control plane.