Patent ID: 9680749
Date: 2017-06-13
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. A non-transitory machine-readable medium having executable instructions to cause one or more processing units perform a method to determine a match for a destination address using an exact match table, the method comprising: receiving, with a network element, a data packet that includes a destination address; generating a first key for the destination address, wherein the key represents more addresses than the destination address; performing an exact match table address lookup using the key with an exact match table, wherein a match in the address lookup indicates a first transmitting interface of the network element and the performing the exact match address lookup comprises, performing a longest prefix match address lookup using the destination address with a longest prefix match table, wherein a match in the address lookup indicates a second transmitting interface of the network element; determining a resulting transmitting interface based on results from the exact match table address lookup and the longest prefix match address lookup; and forwarding the data packet using the transmitting interface.