International Business Machines Corporation

Karla J Norsworthy

Diane Phylis Pozefsky

James P Gray

Andrew Hilliard Arrowood

John E Drake, Jr

John L Eisenbies

Alan E Baratz

Kathryn E Clarke

Terence Dale Smetanka

Philip F Chimento, Jr

In a communications network, each network node can maintain its own list of network resources in a topology database. When the state of a resource 'owned' by a particular node changes, that node broadcasts a topology database update (TDU) message to adjacent nodes. Each adjacent node updates its own topology database and rebroadcasts the message. To minimize the amount of information that must be included in TDU messages when two nodes are reconnected after an outage, each node assigns flow reduction sequence numbers (FRSNs) to TDU meassages and keeps a record of the FRSN for the last TDU message sent to an adjacent node. The node also records, for each resource in its database, the FRSN of the last TDU message including that resource. When two nodes are reconnected, the sending node includes in the TDU message only those resources having a FRSN greater than the FRSN assigned to the last TDU sent to the adjacent node to which the TDU message is directed.

Method of reducing the amount of information included in topology

Each network node in a communications network maintains its own copy of the network topology database defining network resources. Each resource record contains a 'timer' field which is initially set to a maximum value but which may be decremented on a daily basis. If the timer field is decremented to zero without being reset, the node unilaterally removes the resource record from its copy of the database. The timer field will normally reach zero only for obsolete resource records since each network node responsible for a resource broadcasts a timer-resetting message for the resource (1) each time the resource status changes, (2) when the node first joins or rejoins the network, and (3) on a periodic (weekly) basis regardless of whether conditions (1) or (2) have occurred.

Method of maintaining a topology database

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Raleigh, NC, United States of America

Karla J Norsworthy