Abstract: Autonomous link discovery specifies a method and associated procedures that automatically discover various levels of transmission links and paths between transport network elements residing in the transport plane of communications networks. Unlike more traditional centralized polling techniques rooted in a management plane, autonomous link discovery procedures are rooted in and triggered by network elements composing the transport plane. As such, autonomous link discovery procedures may be event driven and execute in a coordinated, distributed fashion to automatically detect new link connectivity associations and correlate link endpoint attributes between these network elements. Once successful link correlations have been determined, autonomous notifications of these correlated link associations are sent to management elements and/or control elements residing in their respective management and control plane domains.