The invention provides a distributed back-up mechanism and a two-step method for facilitating fast control plane recovery in a switched network. In a preferred embodiment, a Label Information Database (LID) maintained at a control node of a GMPLS network is mirrored to an upstream node using the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP). After a control plane interruption resulting in the LDP restart, the control node, using the mirrored information at the upstream node, conducts first a fast coarse LID recovery wherein only the idle labels are identified, to enable the restarted LDP session to process new connection setup. A detailed LDP state information recovery performs in the background in parallel to the normal LDP operations, e.g. using on-demand LDP queries.