US Patent 7193525 Methods and apparatus for downhole inter-tool communication

A method and apparatus for communicating between downhole tools without the necessity of routing the communication through a surface module. Communications sent by downhole tools are examined and extracted downhole. If the communications are intended for other downhole tools, the communications are copied to a downlink and send to a specific intended tool, a group of tools, or all the tools. This is all done downhole, significantly reducing the latency between command and response.