A system and method supporting communication sessions for nodes in a network. A sender node may initiate a send operation to send a message to one or more receiver nodes. For each receiver node, the message may pass from the sender node to the receiver node via a path including a plurality of nodes. At each node through which the message passes, the node may store state information regarding the message. The state information may include information specifying a link via which the message was received. Each receiver node may issue one or more replies to the message. The replies from each receiver node may pass from the receiver node to the sender node via the same path by which the message reached the respective receiver node. This may be accomplished using the state information stored on each node in the path.