Nokia Corporation

Jyrki Valli

Seppo Pohja

Methods and systems for maintaining a connection between a first node and a second node communicating via a connection within a communication network. Data is communicated between the nodes on the basis of addresses assigned to the respective nodes. The addresses are managed by an address management node of the communication network. The system includes a detector unit, at the first node, configured to detect an outage of the existing connection between the nodes, a consulting unit, at the first node, configured to consult after detecting the outage of the connection, the address management node to verify the address assigned to the second node, a transceiver unit, at the address management node, configured to return a current address assigned to the second node, and a connection re-establisher unit, at the first node, configured to re-establish the connection based on the current address assigned to the second node.

Maintaining an existing connection between nodes

A client and a host communicate in a packet data network including a plurality of routing nodes such as routers and firewalls. The host is configured to provide the client with a session and to detect the accessibility of the client by repeatedly sending keep-alive messages to the client. In order to reduce the traffic actually arriving at the client, at least some of the keep-alive message are adjusted such that their routing towards the client will be stopped before the client by storing in a Time-To-Live field specified in the Internet Protocol a value of maximum routing hops defined to correspond with the last routing node before the client on a route from the host to the client. The adaptation of the keep-alive message can also be configured to allow some keep-alive message to reach the client to occasionally test the communication path between the client and server.

Communications control for extending the period over which a terminal is able to have an open connection with a host accessible via a packet data network

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Tampere, Finland

Jyrki Valli