Connectionless group addressing for directory services in high speed packet switching networks

The present invention relates to connectionless transmission in high speed packet switching networks, and in particular to a group addressing method and system for sending a datagram to one or a plurality of destination nodes and within these nodes for duplicating the datagram and to forward it to multiple end users. The claimed invention takes advantage of a specific data transfer mode called "Remote Access to Functional Addressing" allowing the sending of a datagram to a destination node and within said node, the duplication of said datagram for a transmission towards multiple destinations. By distributing, maintaining and using the required addressing information corresponding to these multiple destinations within the node, the claimed group addressing method and system reduce to a minimum, first, the overhead usually associated with multicast operations in connectionless services, and second, the required amount of manual resource definition as in a given node, only local end users of said node have to be manually defined (unless the connectionless protocol allows for some form of automatic discovery of local resources).