Patent ID: 7817639

Claim:
A method of data transmission in a data communication network, comprising: receiving at a destination terminal in the data communication network a connection request from a source terminal, the connection request seeking to establish a connection between the source and destination terminals; determining at the destination terminal a source identifier field length for recording a source identifier in data packets to be transmitted in the connection, wherein the source identifier identifies the connection; determining at the destination terminal a sequence number field length for recording a sequence number in data packets to be transmitted in the connection, wherein the sequence number identifies the relative position of a data packet in a series of data packets transmitted in the connection; transmitting a connection reply from the destination terminal to the source terminal that indicates the determined source identifier field length and sequence number field length; and receiving at the destination terminal one or more data packets from the source terminal, the one or more data packets including: a source identifier recorded in a source identifier field sized according to the determined source identifier field length; and a sequence number recorded in a sequence number field sized according to the determined sequence number field length.