Patent ID: 7117264

Claim:
A method for communicating among a plurality of peer nodes in a network environment, comprising: communicating a discovery command from a current peer node to at least one neighbor peer node, the neighbor peer node in communication with the current peer node, the discovery command including time to live value indicative of the number of times that the discovery command is forwarded prior to communication expiration; and receiving, at the current peer node, an aggregated list of peer nodes, the aggregated list of peer nodes comprising information concerning at least one peer node in communication with the at least one neighbor node, the information including an IP address and a port number on which each peer node can accept incoming connections, and wherein each node waits for a predetermined ping time out delay between communicating a subsequent discovery command; and receiving, at the current peer node, a second discovery command from an originating peer node; and communicating, from the current peer node directly to the originating peer node, the peer table in response to the second discovery command.