US Patent 10482175 Identifying properties of a communication device

A communication device is arranged to transmit a character string that identifies the device. The character string comprises a plurality of substrings, each of which comprises a sequence of characters. A property of the device is identified using a data structure having multiple nodes, wherein each of a plurality of nodes stores a respective hash value. Each hash value corresponds to the hash value that would be generated by performing a hash function on the sequence of characters of each substring. The data structure comprises references between the plurality of nodes, and the references define a path through the data structure that identifies the device. A node on the path is associated with a property of the device.