METHOD FOR DETECTING INVALID PACKETS BY REWRITING TRANSACTION IDENTIFIERS

摘要

The present invention provides a method for reliable stale packet recognition in a network. The method includes: rewriting a packet's transaction identifier (TID) such that the rewritten TID is not a same TID as a previous transaction if the packet could be erroneously seen as a duplicate packet by the receiving router (204); sending the packet to the receiving router; and block the sent packet from transmission to the receiving node if a transaction timer has expired and if the sent packet's TID is the same TID as the previous transaction (212). The method blocks duplicate packets, which arrive at the receiving router after the expiration of the transaction timer. When a packet for a new transaction to be sent to the receiving node is assigned the same TID as the previous transaction, the sending router rewrites the packet's TID to avoid the erroneous recognition of this packet as a duplicate by the receiving router. In this manner, if a packet with the original TID is truly part of a new transaction, it will not be blocked from the receiving node. With this method, errors in the control network due to erroneous duplicate detection when run over an IP network are prevented..