Patent ID: 7633874

Claim:
A system to isolate address family application based errors or events occurring within a routing protocol used to exchange routing information between a router and its peer over a session operating on a reliable transport in a computer network, the system comprising: a plurality of address family application modules of the routing protocol, wherein each module is configured to provide a service and wherein two or more services provided by two or more modules are enabled over the session and reliable transport; and a route processor of the router, the route processor configured to create a Soft Notification message to notify its peer of an error condition or event associated with one of the two or more modules, the Soft Notification message further enabling soft reset of only one of the modules to thereby obviate resetting or terminating of the session and reliable transport, wherein the address family application modules are Address Family Identifier (AFI)/Subsequent Address Family Identifier (SAFI) modules and the Soft Notification message includes an AFI field and a SAFI field, and wherein the AFI/SAFI fields contain values that indicate the AFI/SAFI module for which the error condition or event has occurred and needs to be soft reset and a first reserved value indicates that the Soft Notification message applies to all AFI/SAFI services and wherein a second reserved value contained in only the SAFI field indicates that the Soft Notification message applies to all SAFI services under a particular AFI service.