Patent ID: 7310688

Claim:
An address protocol for forwarding a message packet from a source node to a destination node along a sequence of communicatively coupled nodes functioning as a linear chain network, the address protocol comprising: a relative source address field programmed with an initial value at the source node corresponding to a destination node that is a preselected number of nodes away from the source node along the linear chain network; a relative destination address field containing a counter and a directional code corresponding to a port of the source node from which the message packet is to be sent along the linear chain network; wherein the counter is incremented by a preselected step in value at each node the message packet is forwarded to along the chain network until the counter reaches the initial value, thereby indicating that the destination node has been reached; an identifier field containing an identifier, wherein the identifier indicates whether the message packet contains relative address protocol information; wherein the destination node does not require address information in addition to the counter reaching the initial value to accept the message packet; and wherein, when in the sequence of communicatively coupled nodes functioning as a linear chain network, each message packet encounters a branching node having two or more output ports before reaching the destination node, the branching node has programming configured to return a message indicating that the branching node was reached and reporting the number of hops the branching node is away from the source node.