METHOD AND RELATED APPARATUS FOR ESTABLISHING LINK-DIVERSE TRAFFIC PATHS IN A TELECOMMUNICATIONS NETWORK

In order to achieve path diversity for dual-homed UNI-clients connected to a GMPLS control plane enabled transport network that is operated in an overlay mode, the overlay extension service model is enhanced by adding shared constraint information for path diversity in the optical transport network. In particular, within the provider network, shared constraint information of a first traffic path (LSP1) is determined and a data element indicative of the shared constraint information is returned by a first provider edge node (PE1) to a customer edge device (CE1) via a User-Network Interface. When the customer edge device (CE1) requests a second traffic path (LSP2) through the provider network to be established from a second provider edge node (PE2) and to be disjoint from said first traffic path (LSP1), the customer edge device forwards the data element to the second provider edge node (PE2) to enable path calculation of the second traffic path using the shared constraint information as exclusion list.