Patent ID: 8705551

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a plurality of packets at a port of an ingress line card, each packet associated with a virtual local area network (VLAN) and comprising traffic to be flooded in the associated VLAN; splitting the packets into multiple internal streams; forwarding the packets associated with the internal streams to a switch fabric; at the switch fabric, determining one or more egress line cards of a plurality of line cards to which each internal stream is to be forwarded; forwarding each packet associated with a particular internal stream to the one or more determined egress line cards based on the associated internal stream; mapping the packets of each internal stream to a single egress port of each egress line card to which the packets of each internal stream are forwarded, the single egress port comprising one of a plurality of egress ports associated with a Link Aggregation Group (LAG); and forwarding each packet to the egress port based on the mapping.