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.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for discovering network paths sets a bit, normally used for purposes other than tracing a network path, in an overhead portion of a signal for causing state changes at nodes along a network path. The state changes are correlated with information about the signal to determine link connectivity between nodes to identify the network path. In a network of DS3 circuits, a non-critical alarm bit is set in a signal to transmit Remote Alarm Indications (RAI) which activate alarms at nodes of the network path. A response signal from the nodes can be sent through a network to a main node for correlation purposes. The method of discovering network paths can be used to update network path databases of network carriers and can be offered as a service to network carriers.