Patent ID: 8566453

Claim:
A method comprising: detecting, by a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP), a failure of a connection establishing, by the PEP, another connection with a Policy Decision Point (PDP) after detecting the failure of the connection; sending, by the PEP, a client-open message, of a common open policy service for policy provisioning (COPS-PR) protocol, to the PDP, the client-open message including: an Internet Protocol (IP) address of a last PDP associated with the PEP, and a port number of the last PDP, the client-open message being sent after establishing the other connection; receiving, by the PEP and based on sending the client-open message, a message from the PDP, the message indicating an acceptance of the client-open message; receiving, by the PEP and from the PDP, a null decision message of the COPS-PR protocol, the null decision message indicating that a fast state synchronization is to be performed, the null decision message being received when the PDP determines that the fast state synchronization is to be performed based on: the PDP determining that the IP address of the last PDP and the port number of the last PDP match an IP address of the PDP and a port number of the PDP, or the PDP determining that: the IP address of the last PDP does not match the IP address of the PDP, the PDP includes state information of the last PDP, the PDP being a backup of the last PDP, and the IP address of the last PDP, included in the client-open message, corresponds to an IP address of the last PDP associated with the state information of the last PDP; sending, by the PEP, a message indicating an approval to perform the fast state synchronization when the null decision message is received; initiating, by the PEP, the fast state synchronization based on sending the message indicating the approval of the fast state synchronization; and initiating, by the PEP, a full state synchronization when the PDP issues a message to request the full state synchronization.