Patent ID: 8165129

Claim:
A computer-executed method for facilitating re-transmitting unacknowledged packets and receiver window control in a communication network, comprising: transmitting one or more packets to one or more neighbors in a designated time slot; receiving one or more acknowledgments from a respective neighbor, wherein a respective acknowledgment is associated with a given past time slot and confirms that the data packets in the time slot have been processed by the neighbor; receiving a processed-through-counter (PTC) from the neighbor, wherein the PTC is a single value indicating a time slot; wherein the packets transmitted in any time slot up to the time slot indicated in the PTC have either been received and acknowledged by the neighbor or have not been received successfully by the neighbor; and wherein the PTC does not advance beyond a time slot corresponding to a earliest unacknowledged packet; identifying a time slot, up to the time slot indicated in the PTC and which has not been acknowledged by the neighbor; and re-transmitting previously transmitted packets associated with the identified time slot to the neighbor without using a re-transmit timer.