Patent ID: 8880726

Claim:
A method of communicating signaling information in a telecommunications signaling network, comprising: receiving, in a processor, a topology tree data structure that includes information that categorizes components within the telecommunications signaling network into hierarchical groups; receiving, in the processor, a first message encoding signaling information from a source component; decoding the received first message into an internal representation that stores the signaling information included in the received first message in two or more structured information fields; performing application level routing operations using contextual information derived from information included in a structured information field of the internal representation to identify a root node in the received topology tree data structure; traversing the hierarchical groups of the received topology tree data structure from the identified root node to identify a terminal node destination component; encoding the signaling information contained in the structured information fields of the internal representation into a second message; and sending the second message to the identified terminal node destination component.