METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETERMINING IP COMMUNICATIONS PATH

摘要

Method and apparatus for determining a data path between source (11) and destination (12) IP devices. A TTL mechanism is used, in combination with loose-source routing, to incrementally discover the routers on the path, wherein the querying node (13) sending the UDP probe packets need not be the source node. Once an intermediate router on the path is known which can communicate via SNMP, an SNMP query may be sent to determine the next-hop router from the IP routing table. If this fails, the method reverts to the incrementing TTL mechanism.