Patent ID: 7986697

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving information fragments from a first communication path and from a second communication path, each information fragment associated with a respective serial number indicating a generation time of that information fragment, and wherein the serial numbers are cyclic serial numbers; storing information fragments received from the first communication path at a first input queue and storing information fragments received from the second communication path at a second input queue, the first input queue including a first head and the second input queue including a second head; determining that a first information fragment at the first head is valid and that a binary representation of a first serial number associated with the first information fragment includes two most-significant bits each having a value of binary one; updating, in response to the determining, the first serial number and a second serial number, the second serial number associated with a second information fragment at the second head, wherein updating comprises inverting a most-significant bit of the first and second serial numbers, respectively; selecting, in response to the updating, the first input queue or the second input queue based on evaluating which of the first and the second serial numbers is smaller; and sending information fragment metadata included at the respective head of the selected input queue to an output queue.