Patent ID: 8467370

Claim:
A method of communicating in a network, comprising: sending, by a first node, a message to two or more neighbor nodes; responding, by the two or more neighbor nodes, with a message to the first node, the response message including information comprising an indication of a beacon frequency, an indication of a beacon transmit time and information about a current hopping sequence; periodically tuning a receiver, by the first node, to the beacon frequency of one of the two or more neighbor nodes at an associated beacon transmit time based on respective response messages of the two or more neighbor nodes, wherein the first node assigns a priority to each of the two or more neighbor nodes and tunes to a beacon frequency of one of the two or more neighbor nodes based on the priority assigned to and unknown to each of the two or more neighbor nodes, and wherein the message of the beacon frequency not tuned to is not received by the first node; and using the information about the hopping sequence to receive information comprising routing information and timing updates from a beacon of the two or more neighbor nodes for hopping channel synchronization.