Patent ID: 7130621

Claim:
A method for creating and maintaining a unique electronic group label for a first node in a network, the group label indicating membership in a group of technical devices being nodes in the network, the nodes being capable of providing services or resources to other nodes of the network and using services or resources provided by other nodes of the network, wherein the group label is used for identifying the group and individual nodes are identified by other unique labels, the method comprising the steps of: detecting if a second node connected to said first node has a group label associated; automatically creating a group label when said first node is connected to the second node, if neither of said two nodes has already a group label associated; associating the automatically created group label to the first node if neither of said two nodes has already a group label associated, wherein nodes can have only one group label associated at a time; detecting if the second nodes group label is the same as the first nodes group label, if the second node has already a group label associated when connecting; and enabling communication between the two nodes if their group labels are identical.