Patent ID: 7746866

Claim:
A method implemented in a non transitory machine-readable medium and processed by a processing node of a network, the method comprising: acquiring, at a data link layer of a wireless mesh network protocol stack, a source address, a destination address, and a message sequence number from a sequence number field of a media access control header of a wireless data frame, wherein the sequence number field is separate from a sequence control field in the media access control (MAC) header; comparing, at the data link layer of the wireless mesh network protocol stack, a last-received message sequence number for the source address against the message sequence number and comparing the destination address to a current address; maintaining a separate queue for each source address and deciding that there are no additional frames to forward to a particular processing node when a particular queue is empty and further deciding that the additional frames when present in the particular queue are to be purged from that particular queue when a number of the additional frames are sequentially out of order within the particular queue; and deciding, at the data link layer of the wireless mesh network protocol stack and in response to the compares, whether to perform at least one of: forwarding the wireless data frame to a next processing node; discarding the wireless data frame; queuing the wireless data frame; or releasing the wireless data frame to a next protocol layer.