Patent ID: 7272310

Claim:
A method for establishing a reservation of a lightpath traversing a plurality of lightpath segments coupled between nodes in an optical switched network, comprising: passing a resource reservation request containing a generalized multi-protocol label-switching (GMPLS)-based label to each of the nodes traversed by the lightpath; updating a segment ID field of the GMPLS-based label at each of the nodes to identify one of the plurality of lightpath segments to which each of the nodes is coupled; and reserving each of the of lightpath segments along the lightpath for a scheduled timeframe by updating a reservation table maintained in each of the nodes with a respective lightpath segment reservation, wherein each lightpath segment reservation references its corresponding lightpath segment using the segment ID field contained in the GMPLS-based label, wherein the GMPLS-based label includes at least one field identifying an input wavelength employed for carrying the signals over the lightpath segment identified by the GMPLS-based label, wherein the input wavelength is defined by a value stored in the IEEE standard 754 single precision floating point format, wherein the input wavelength is based on a function of a channel spacing variable, and the GMPLS-based label includes a wavelength field and a channel spacing field to store a channel spacing value.