Patent ID: 7898981

Claim:
A system comprising: a distribution router further comprising: a first module that characterizes additional routers connected to the distribution router as stub routers or non-stub routers and that provides a signal in response thereto, wherein a stub router is configured such that other routers do not send route queries to the stub router; and a second module that selectively queries the non-stub routers for route information and that does not query the stub routers for the route information based on the signal, wherein the second module includes a selective peer-querying module, wherein the selective peer-querying module includes instructions for selectively unicasting or multicasting queries from the distribution router to non-stub routers, and wherein the selective peer-querying module further includes instructions for multicasting a first set of instructions to the additional routers that instruct the stub routers to ignore or discard one or more subsequent multicast queries.