Patent ID: 9413669
Filing Date: 2016-08-09
CPC Classification: H04L,Y02D

Claim Text:
1. A method, in a device comprising a processor, for performing traffic load balancing on ingress traffic directed to a Link Aggregation Group (LAG), the method comprising: monitoring, by the device, an ingress traffic load across a plurality of links of the Link Aggregation Group (LAG); determining, by the device, if the ingress traffic load across the plurality of links is unbalanced; and in response to determining that the ingress traffic load across the plurality of links is unbalanced, sending, by the device, a message to a switch associated with the LAG requesting the switch to modify routing of ingress traffic to the LAG to perform ingress traffic load balancing, wherein the message is an extended Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) message extended to include one or more fields for specifying parameters for the ingress traffic load balancing to the switch, and wherein the one or more fields comprises a first field in a LACP header of the extended LACP message that is reserved for an actor, and a second field in the LACP header of the extended LACP message that is reserved for a partner.