Patent ID: 7613150

Claim:
A method for restarting a first wireless switch when the first wireless switch fails, wherein the first wireless switch comprises a control plane comprising a control plane layer 3 (L3) mobility module and a control plane wireless client database (CPWCDb), and a data plane comprising a data-forwarder module and a data plane wireless client database (KWCDb), the method comprising: restarting the control plane L3 mobility module of the first wireless switch, when the first wireless switch fails, and transmitting a restart message from the first wireless switch to the peer wireless switches of the first wireless switch to announce that the first wireless switch has restarted and to begin re-establishing peering sessions with peer wireless switches of the first wireless switch; resetting a home wireless client database (HWCDb) of the first wireless switch with the information from the KWCDb, and transmitting a first message from the first wireless switch to peer wireless switches of the first wireless switch, wherein the first message comprises the information in the HWCDb of the first wireless switch; receiving, at the peer wireless switches, information in the HWCDb of the first wireless switch, storing the information from the HWCDb of the first wireless switch in respective CPWCDbs of the peer wireless switches, and initially marking the wireless client devices in the respective CPWCDbs of the peer wireless switches as stale entries; exchanging information from respective home wireless client databases (HWCDbs) of each peer wireless switch with the first wireless switch as a peering session is established between the first wireless switch and that peer wireless switch, wherein each respective HWCDb comprises the set of wireless client devices for which the particular peer wireless switch is the home wireless switch; refreshing the CPWCDb of the first wireless switch and the KWCDb of the first wireless switch with updated information about each of the wireless client devices in the mobility domain such that the CPWCDb of the first wireless switch and the KWCDb of the first wireless switch are synchronized with information from the respective HWCDbs of the peer wireless switches, and transmitting the updated HWCDb of the first wireless switch to the peer wireless switches; and refreshing stale entries in the respective CPWCDbs of the peer wireless switches with the updated information from the updated HWCDb of the first wireless switch such that the respective CPWCDb of the each peer wireless switch and the respective KWCDb of each peer wireless switch are synchronized with the updated HWCDb of the first wireless switch.