Patent ID: 7453873

Claim:
A method for identifying relevancy of packets, the method comprising: maintaining one or more data structures in memory associating source addresses with network topology indications; receiving a first packet over a network, the first packet including a particular source address and a particular network topology indication; retrieving a maintained network topology indication from said one or more data structures based on the particular source address; and comparing said retrieved maintained network topology indication with the particular network topology indication, and in response: dropping the first packet in response to identifying said retrieved maintained network topology indication does not match the particular network topology indication, or processing the first packet in response to identifying said retrieved maintained network topology indication matches the particular network topology indication; wherein the network topology indication is a value representing a particular topology of the network; wherein different topology indications represent different topologies of the network; and wherein a change in the topology of the network to a new topology results in a different topology indication used to represent the new topology of the network.