Patent ID: 8014378

Claim:
A communication unit that transmits messages to and receives messages from neighboring communication units, the communication unit comprising: a transmitter to transmit an outgoing message to a neighboring communication unit; a receiver to receive an incoming message from a neighboring communication unit; a storage unit to store communication unit connectivity information, neighboring communication unit connectivity information and merge request information; and a processor to control said transmission of outgoing messages and reception of incoming messages, wherein said processor includes: a synchronization module to join the communication unit to an existing communication network at power up from among a plurality of existing communication networks each with a different Time Of Day synchronization mode, and to start an isolated network with neighboring communication units in response to failure to join the communication unit to at least one of the existing communication networks; a merge module to examine said stored communication unit connectivity information, stored neighboring communication unit connectivity information and stored merge request information to determine merge control parameters to control merger between the network containing the communication unit and operating in a first Time Of Day synchronization mode and a neighboring communication network operating in a second Time Of Day synchronization mode that is different from the first mode, wherein the network containing the communication unit includes a plurality of communication units and said neighboring communication network includes a plurality of communication nodes; and a controller module to control merging of the communication unit with said neighboring communication network in accordance with said merge control parameters determined by said merge module to merge the network containing the communication unit with the neighboring communication network.