Patent ID: 8751669

Claim:
A method of maintaining a connection established in a multi-hop network between a first host and a second host and passing through at least one network node that is designed to release the connection after a certain time of inactivity the method comprising the steps of: sending from the first host towards the second host at least one probe packet having a time-to-live information field set to a probe value L probe ; receiving either a corresponding acknowledge packet ACK or a corresponding time-to-live exceeded packet; decrementing the probe value L probe if an acknowledge packet ACK is received or incrementing the probe value L probe if a time-to-live exceeded packet is received; repeating the steps using a binary search algorithm until a hop value L HV has been determined that is less than the number of hops the probe packet needs to make in order to reach the second host but greater than or equal to the number of hops the probe packet needs to make in order to reach the network node; wherein a number of probe packets that need to be sent in order to determine the hop value L HV is equal to log 2(L max ), wherein L max is equal to a maximum number of hops; and sending a keep-alive packet from the first host towards the second host where the keep-alive packet is designed to delay the release of the connection and having a time-to-live information field set to the hop value L HV .