Patent 7130304 was granted and assigned to Redback Networks on October, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method and apparatus for graceful restart is described. A method in a network device provides for refreshing a set of one or more labels after a label propagation module has restarted, the set of one or more labels having been allocated for the label propagation module prior to the label propagation module dying, and communicating the refreshed set of labels to a set of one or more peer label switching network devices.