Methods, apparatus and communication network for providing restoration survivability

The invention relates to a method and an apparatus for proving protection in a connection oriented packet switched communications network. Embodiments of the invention disclose detecting a fault in a path of the network, the path comprising at least one network resource, determining a new path for the traffic, restoring the traffic to the new path, and determining where the fault has occurred in the path using the management plane to correlate the fault with the at least one network resource using a configuration map of the network. The embodiments of the invention provide for dynamic protection using a management plane in the event of a failure in the network.