Patent ID: 7626967

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, by a portal node from a source node, a broadcast data packet intended for a destination node, wherein the portal node is one of a plurality of mesh nodes associated with a wireless mesh network and communicatively coupling the wireless mesh network to a communication network different than the wireless mesh network, the source node is one of the plurality of mesh nodes of the wireless mesh network, and the destination node is one of a plurality of nodes of the communication network; broadcasting, by the portal node, the broadcast data packet received via the wireless mesh network over the communication network to determine that the destination node is one of the plurality of nodes of the communication network; appending, by the portal node, a bridging table with bridging information indicating that the destination node is one of the plurality of nodes of the communication network; receiving, by the portal node, another packet including destination address information of the destination node; identifying, by the portal node from the bridging table, bridging information associated with the destination address information; and processing, by the portal node, the other packet based on the bridging information associated with the destination address information.