Retransmission of mesh link establishment advertisements in a thread network

Abstract

An approach is described for a wireless device comprising a transceiver and a processor communicatively coupled to the transceiver. In a thread-based mesh network, a transmitting device occasionally transmits various multicast messages to the network for the purpose of maintaining the network. Of these messages, the mesh link establishment (MLE) advertisement message is particularly important as it notifies neighbor routers as to the presence and function of the transmitting device. Therefore, the transmitting device of the present disclosure transmits its MLE advertisement message to the network multiple times within a given time window. Additionally, the message is transmitted each time with a same identifier. A recipient device stores the identifier of each most recent MLE advertisement message. The identifier of each subsequently received MLE advertisement is compared to the stored identifier. This allows the recipient device to determine whether the message has been previously received.