A method and system of communicating state information between devices of a communications network is provided. A gateway of a packet network may change operating states during transmission of packets to another gateway. The gateway may indicate the state change to the receiving gateway by sending a burst of messages to the receiving gateway. If the gateway does not respond to any of these messages, the gateway may then send another message to the receiving gateway, which requires the receiving gateway to respond. Or, the gateway may send individual messages to the receiving gateway for a desired amount of time and, if the receiving gateway does not respond to any of these, then the gateway may again send the must respond message to the receiving gateway.