A method of admission control and routing of virtual circuits

A method of admitting and routing switched virtual circuit requests (210) in a network first finds a set of routing paths on which a requested VC may be routed by using a two step process (220). The method uses a cost function based on a parameter related to the number of hops in a subset of VC connections previously made in the network to determine potential routing paths on which the VC can be routed at a cost below a specified threshold. The method next checks to determine which potential routing paths comprise links and nodes with sufficient resources to accommodate the request. Paths satisfying both steps are output as a set of routing paths and then a second criterion is used to select (240) a path from the set on which to route the request (250). In a distributed routing system, the inventive method uses a local network state to determine the cost function and the set of routing paths. The method further updates (260) local state information at nodes along a path selected from the set and permits other paths from the set to be selected for routing a requested VC if the previously selected path has insufficient resources to accommodate the request.