Patent ID: 7003582

Claim:
In a network environment including one or more network processing (NP) devices implemented for communicating packets, each NP device supporting a forwarding table comprising entries to enable forwarding of received data packets from a source device to a destination device according to a routing protocol via a network connection, said network processing device receiving forwarding table entries from one or more network control devices executing one or more routing protocol applications, a method for updating forwarding table entries of an existing forwarding table when a routing protocol application has failed in a network control device comprising: a) generating for each forwarding table entry, a data structure indicating identification of the routing protocol application and a version of a particular routing protocol application instance generating said entry, said data structure received by said existing forwarding table and incorporated within a respective forwarding table entry; b) upon re-starting a failed routing protocol application in a network control device, incrementing a version value of that re-started routing protocol application instance; c) updating said data structures of the existing forwarding table entries with said incremented protocol application version values; d) identifying for deletion those existing forwarding table entries having data structures matching a designated selection criteria including an indication of a prior protocol application version value; and, e) deleting said designated forwarding table entries, whereby forwarding table entries in said existing forwarding table are updated efficiently without disrupting packet forwarding process, and without disrupting network connectivity by having to reconstruct a new forwarding table.