Patent ID: 8437274

Claim:
A method of discovering network nodes and management information distributed in different strongly connected components, SCCs, in a traffic network, said method comprising the steps of: receiving a request for network management information at an application level in a first network node in a first SCC; determining that the first network node does not have any neighboring nodes at the application level or is part of a cycle; utilizing a functional overlay layer to identify and select a set of neighboring nodes to receive the request, wherein at least one of the selected neighboring nodes is in a second SCC; and sending the request to the selected neighboring nodes at the overlay layer; wherein the functional overlay network layer is implemented utilizing a Distributed Hash Table, DHT, and wherein: the step of utilizing the functional overlay layer to identify and select a set of neighboring nodes to receive the request includes selecting between log N and L neighboring nodes, where N is the number of nodes in the network and L is the size of a leafset in the overlay network layer.