Patent ID: 7639681

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for cooperatively managing a routed IP address space in the absence of managed network services, comprising: identifying cooperative agents on a backbone network; selecting a backbone address for a current cooperative agent on the backbone network; wherein selecting the backbone address for the current cooperative agent includes comparing a portion of a selected backbone address for the current cooperative agent with the same portion of a selected backbone address of each of the identified cooperative agents on the backbone network; selecting a client subnet address that corresponds to the current cooperative agent; receiving a notification of an allocated client subnet address from another cooperative agent; wherein relevance of the received notification is determined according to at least one of a timestamp included in the received notification and a hop count associated with the received notification; notifying other cooperative agents on the backbone network of the client subnet address selection; determining the relevance of the received notification; forwarding the received notification to neighboring cooperative agents when the received notification is determined as relevant; and discarding the received notification when the received notification is determined as irrelevant.