At the time of the present patent application demand for increased data capacity and efficiency in Internet traffic continues to increase dramatically as more individuals and businesses increase their use of the Internet. The ever-increasing demand also drives development of equipment for the Internet such as data packet routers. A number of enterprises are developing routers that are capable of faster and higher capacity handling of data packets.
The Internet, operating globally, comprises components from a wide variety of companies and organizations. It is, of course, necessary that such equipment conform to certain hardware and connection standards and operate by certain data transfer standards and protocols. These standards are all well known to the skilled artisan.
As new and better equipment for routing data traffic in the Internet continues to be developed, researchers developing such equipment are including fault tolerance, diagnostic capabilities, and redundancy into the equipment, links between instances of routing equipment, and in routing protocols.
One of the important developments in Internet technology as of the time of filing of the present patent application is in development of faster, and scalable routers. The present inventors, for example, are involved in development of what are known in the art as Terabit routers, capable of much higher packet transfer rates than currently available in the art. These routers are scalable to higher and higher overall data transfer rates, by allowing upwards of seven thousand interfaces to network traffic.
As the number of interfaces to network traffic grows, the importance of scalability and fault-tolerance grows apace. What is clearly needed is a method for making link-state routing protocols both scalable and fault tolerant.
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