The present invention is a
telecommunications network having a hierarchical architecture which reduces the amount of equipment and
processing required to recover from network failures. In an exemplary embodiment, the nodes of the network are divided into high level nodes and low level nodes. High
granularity traffic is collected, routed and manipulated at high level nodes, but generally passes through low level nodes, which generally lack the capability for routing and manipulating such high
granularity traffic. Equipment savings results from low level nodes lacking the capability to manipulate traffic other than traffic relevant to those nodes or nearby nodes. Each high level node pair is connected by at least three node disjoint paths of low level nodes and links. Less protection capacity is needed, as each node disjoint path is expected to
handle only a portion of rerouted traffic in the event of a network equipment failure.
Recovery is decentralized, and is thus faster, requires less equipment, and is less susceptible to the failure of a centralized controller than with networks using centralized
recovery processing.