Patent ID: 7403493

Claim:
A method for acquiring electronic information about transmission speeds between nodes of an acyclical network, in particular an IEEE 1394 bus network, precisely one dedicated transmission path being present between each two of the nodes of the network, and a respective physical layer transmission speed, hereinafter called PHY speed of the transmission link along said transmission path being determined by a minimum value of PHY speeds of the nodes of the network lying on the transmission path, the respective PHY speed being determined for one subset of the transmission links in the network by acquiring the PHY speeds of the nodes lying on the transmission paths and electronically acquiring minimum values of the PHY speeds; and the respective PHY speed being electronically determined for another subset of the transmission links, which differs from the one subset of the transmission links, on the basis of one of the PHY speeds which have been acquired for the nodes lying on the transmission paths of the one subset, and electronic topology information about a topology of the network being electronically determined using minimum value determining means for PHY speeds which are formed in one of the nodes of the network.