Patent ID: 7920466

Claim:
A method, comprising: establishing a plurality of child tunnels each having a portion that spans a shared path segment; establishing a hierarchical tunnel that encapsulates the portion of the plurality of child tunnels that spans the shared path segment; establishing a backup tunnel from a point of local repair (PLR) for a child tunnel of the plurality of child tunnels to the hierarchical tunnel's head-end node's (grooming node's) downstream hierarchical tunnel neighbor (merge point); learning a corresponding backup tunnel label at the PLR; storing a label stack at the PLR having at least i) the backup tunnel label, ii) a hierarchical tunnel label for the merge point, and iii) a child tunnel label as advertised by the hierarchical tunnel's tail-end node; detecting a failure of the grooming node; pushing the stored label stack onto traffic for the child tunnel at the PLR in response to detecting the failure; and rerouting the traffic with the pushed label stack onto the backup tunnel toward the merge point.