Patent ID: 8737268

Claim:
A system comprising: a wireless mesh network having at least a first node and a second node; wherein each of the nodes comprises a respective processing element enabled to execute wireless mesh networking functions; wherein the wireless mesh networking functions comprise a path determination function to determine a path between two nodes of the wireless mesh network, a path comparison function to compare a first path determined by the path determination function with a second path determined by the path determination function, a node divergence function to determine when a node is a first node of divergence between the first path and the second path, the first node of divergence being a one of the nodes having at least first, second, and third links to respective other nodes of the wireless mesh network, and the first path and the second path commonly comprise the first link and respectively comprise the second link and the third link, and a path dissemination function to control distribution of path information to nodes of the wireless mesh network; wherein the path dissemination function conditionally distributes a new path to a plurality of recipients when a better path is available; and wherein the conditional distribution is based on the node divergence function determining that a node is the first node of divergence between the new path and a previous path.