Abstract:
Disclosed herein is a method of establishing a path for data transport from a source network element (NE) to a destination NE in a communication network comprising a plurality of NEs and links between said NEs. The method comprises the steps of computing, at a central controller, a data path from said source NE to said destination NE along a number of intermediate NEs, sending, from said central controller, central control messages to all or at least a plurality of NEs among said source NE, said intermediate NEs and said destination NE, said central control messages including explicit path information, said explicit path information in at least some of the central control messages comprising more information than needed by the recipient NE for its set-up for data transport along said path, and sending distributed control messages between NEs of said path, said distributed control messages being based on at least one central control message received by one of said NEs. Said distributed control messages allow for distributing switch set-up information that was lost due to failure in the transfer of a central control message.
Abstract:
The present invention relates to the field of re-routing packet data in a data communication network, where it is desired to maintain the original packet order at the receiver end without significantly increasing system complexity, processing latency or related costs. For this purpose, the present invention suggests a method of re-routing at least one data-stream and a network element for re-routing at least one data-stream. A first part and a second part of a data-stream received at a first node and are transmitted to a second node via two different network paths, respectively. The first part of the at least one data-stream is transmitted from the first node to the second node via a first network path. A second network path for transmitting the second part to the second node is determined, and the difference between latencies of the first and second network paths is also determined. If the latency of the first network path is larger than the latency of the second network path, the at least one data-stream at the first node is re-routed from the first network path to the second network path provided that the time gap between data packets of the at least one data-stream received by the first node exceeds said difference between latencies.