Patent ID: 6985454

Claim:
A satellite communication system comprising: a plurality of satellites and a plurality of gateways, said satellite communication system being bidirectionally coupled to a terrestrial communication system through said plurality of gateways, said satellite communication system and said terrestrial communications system comprising together a data communication network having a plurality of nodes including source nodes, destination nodes and intermediate nodes, wherein multiple copies of a packet are selectively generated within the data communications network based on a criteria that includes at least one of (a) whether the packet was previously duplicated by a previous node, and (b) a direction of transmission, from source to destination or from destination to source, wherein said multiple copies of a packet coexist within the data communications network and are routed, using at least in part satellite-resident routers and gateway-resident routers, over a plurality of different paths between a particular source node and a particular destination node, and wherein at least one duplicate copy of a given packet is not used during the execution of a packet reordering procedure in the destination node, or at an intermediate node.