Patent ID: 7738369

Claim:
A method for data transmission in a communication network comprising a transmitter and a receiver, the method comprising: (a) caching in memory one or more first-type protocol data units (PDUs) received at a data link layer of the transmitter from a network layer of the transmitter; (b) selecting a first subset of the one or more first-type PDUs for combination into a second-type PDU; (c) generating the second-type PDU from the first subset of one or more selected first-type PDUs; (d) caching in memory a data structure adapted to allow regeneration of the second-type PDU, wherein the regeneration does not rely on any cached copy of the second-type PDU; (e) transmitting the second-type PDU via a physical layer of the transmitter for receipt by the receiver; and (f) determining whether the transmitter received an acknowledgement of successful receipt of the second-type PDU by the receiver, wherein: if the transmitter did not receive the acknowledgement of successful receipt, then the second-type PDU is re-generated using the cached data structure and the first subset of one or more selected first-type PDUs, and steps (e) and (f) are repeated; and if the transmitter did receive the acknowledgement of successful receipt, then the memory used to cache the data structure and the memory used to cache the first subset of one or more selected first-type PDUs are freed.