Patent 7218852 was granted and assigned to Ciena (company) on May, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system and method for discovering lightpath information in an optical network is disclosed. A selected node is requested to provide lightpath information. The node, in turn, requests the other node of the optical network to provide channel attribute data. The node processes the channel attribute data of a plurality of nodes to determine the lightpath information.