Patent 7551550 was granted and assigned to Ciena (company) on June, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An embodiment of the invention is a method of allocating protection path resources including obtaining a link vector for a plurality of protection paths. The link vector includes a plurality of link vector elements. A proposed link vector is determined for each of the protection paths. The proposed link vector includes a plurality of proposed link vector elements and is indicative of allocating a respective protection path to a working path. A link cost is determined based on the proposed link vector and the obtained link vector. A path cost is determined for at least two protection paths based on the past cost.