PACKET RADIO SYSTEM AND METHODS FOR A PROTOCOL-INDEPENDENT ROUTING OF A DATA PACKET IN PACKET RADIO NETWORKS

摘要

The present invention relates to a protocol-independent routing of datapackets between a mobile station of a packet radio networkand a party (Host) connected to an external network. In the invention, a datapacket of an extraneous protocol (IPX) is transferred througha packet radio network using a second protocol (X.25) as encapsulated in adata packet according to the second protocol. The transferringpacket radio network does not thus need to understand the protocol of thetransferred extraneous data packet or to be able to interpret thecontents of the data packet. A data packet network is connected to otherpacket radio networks, data networks or the backbone networkbetween packet data networks via a gateway node (GPRS GSN), which uses thenetwork-internal protocol (X.25) towards the dedicatedpacket network and the protocol of each network towards other networks. When adata packet is transferred via a gateway node froma network into another network, the data packet is encapsulated in a packetaccording to the protocol of the new network. When theencapsulated data packet arrives in a node which supports the protocol of theencapsulated data packet, the encapsulation is stripped awayand the data packet is routed forward according to the protocol of the datapacket.