Patent ID: 11863370
Assignee: FUTUREWEI TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 8:
9. A system comprising:
a first network element (NE) having circuitry for executing computer instructions that comprise a first copy of a primary application and having a first transmission control protocol (TCP) module;
a second NE having circuitry for executing computer instructions that comprise a second copy of the primary application and having a second TCP module; and
a third NE having circuitry for executing computer instructions that comprise a third copy of the primary application and having a third TCP module;
where the first NE acts as an active NE, the second NE and the third NE act as standby NEs of the first NE;
where the first NE is communicably coupled to the second NE and the third NE, and where the first TCP module, the second TCP module and the third TCP module synchronize packet traffic with one another to provide, via a line card that couples the first NE, the second NE, and the third NE to a network, an ordered error-checked delivery of a stream of bytes between the primary application and an application on a peer device coupled to the network and where sequence numbers for most recent acknowledged data packets by each of the NEs are used to synchronize data packets in remaining NEs in response to a failure of any one of the first NE, the second NE, and the third NE;
where the second NE becomes a new active NE in response to failure of the first NE, and where the new active NE is configured to:
receive a sequence number for each one of most recent acknowledged data packets from the third NE;
send a minimum sequence number among the received sequence numbers to the third NE;
receive data corresponding to sequence numbers between the minimum sequence number and the sequence number from the third NE; and
send the received data to the third NE.