Patent ID: 8422395
Filing Date: 2013-04-16
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for distributing a health information and a performance information of network gateways, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of multicast messages from a plurality of network gateways in a domain, each of the plurality of multicast messages generated by at least one of the plurality of network gateways, the multicast messages comprising Media Access Control (MAC) address data, status data indicating an active status or a standby status, and bandwidth data, the plurality of multicast messages published on a predictable schedule; building a hash table of the MAC address data, the status data, and the bandwidth data; assigning a reliability indicator to each of the plurality of network gateways, the reliability indicator indicating a reliability based on a ratio of received multicast messages to expected multicast messages, the reliability indicator indicating a low reliability when at least one of the expected multicast messages is missing; ranking the plurality of network gateways maintained in the hash table; routing a flow of data packets to an address of a high ranked gateway maintained in the hash table, wherein the routing distributes a load across the plurality of network gateways by using a MAC rotation; and updating the hash table in response to the plurality of multicast messages.