Traffic based shortcut method and router

摘要

The present invention relates to a method and related device to be used to establish a traffic based shortcut when running the Internet Protocol (IP) over a connection oriented network. Such a network may exists of a number of switch-routers and/or one or more IP-routers and/or one or more switches. The shortcutting is performed by the co-operation of the present IP-routers and/or IP-router-parts. The described configuration manages the forwarding of IP packet flows along a shortcut path. For each shortcut path set-up, a separate virtual channel connection is used. Only a restricted number of virtual channels is available for shortcut paths to be set up. To use the available virtual channels more efficiently, an existing shortcut path can be used to forward one or more IP packet flows simultaneously with, or subsequently to the first shortcutted flow. Also by relating the time-out period of a shortcut path to the local network load the efficiency can be increased.