Patent attributes
Dynamic restoration involves routing and bandwidth assignment of an unplanned restoration path in a wavelength switched optical network (20), having regeneration nodes (60), nodes each having a ROADM (62) having drop paths and add paths. An electrical switch (68) provides configurable regeneration capacity by coupling selected drop paths to selected add paths. Some of the configurable regeneration capacity is kept for unplanned restoration paths. A PCE determines (120) routing and bandwidth assignments for an unplanned restoration path for the traffic flow to avoid a fault, and sends (130) configuration messages to the nodes to set up the unplanned restoration path dynamically and to configure the electrical switch to provide regeneration on the path. Keeping some reconfigurable regeneration capacity enables much longer unplanned paths to be found to avoid faults, and enables wavelength conversion if needed. Thus the reliability of finding at least one path avoiding the fault can be increased.
