Patent ID: 7720025

Claim:
A method for searching services, resources and/or functionalities in a network, wherein the network comprises a multitude of nodes to which routable network addresses are assigned, wherein the services, resources and/or functionalities that are to be searched are specified by a source node, the method comprising: specifying a direction within the network by at least one destination node and/or nodes near to the destination node, by which a routing path is defined between the source node and the corresponding destination node; and including in the search only preconfigurable nodes near to the routing path between the source and destination nodes, wherein every node that is searched sends an echo back to its corresponding parent node and wherein each parent node—in case it has not received an echo from one or more of its child nodes—waits for a pre-configurable period of time—a timeout—before it sends an echo without the information of the corresponding child nodes to its parent node, wherein the timeout for a node is longer the closer the node is positioned to a node on the routing path.