US Patent 7639692 Unified inverse address resolution

The present invention provides a technique for conveying Inverse Address Resolution Protocol (InARP) packets between a source node and an end node. A data path is established through a data communication network between the source node and the end node by exchanging signaling messages between network nodes along the data path. InARP requests are sent through the control address space used for controlling the operation of the network. At the source node, a common path identifier that identifies the data path is encoded into a request that is sent to the end node for identifying a particular data path that terminates at that end node, and for returning a data network address associated with that data path.