US Patent 11516725 Rapid topology discovery through identification of mesh network edges

To speed up a firmware update process, a gateway performs an expedited topological discovery of networked nodes. The gateway maintains a list of unlinked network nodes that are not known to share good edges with other nodes. The gateway transmits a topology query to a selected unlinked node, which the node retransmits to its neighboring nodes. Each neighboring node responds to the gateway with a link status of the edge between the queried node and the neighbor. The queried node and each neighboring node with an edge of sufficient link quality are removed from the list of unlinked nodes. The process is repeated until no networked nodes remain in the list of unlinked nodes. The gateway then sends a firmware update to nodes that will in turn retransmit the update over identified good edges.