Patent ID: 7441022

Claim:
A method for facilitating high speed network packet flow by resolving conflicts between network service rules for network data traffic in a system where rule patterns with longer prefixes match before rule patterns with shorter prefixes, comprising: receiving one or more flows of packets; receiving a set of network service rules for network data traffic from multiple network services, wherein network service rules from different network services can possibly conflict; wherein each of the network service rules specifies, a filter that defines a prefix for a set of packets in the packet flow, and an action list that specifies one or more actions to be applied to the set of packets; identifying conflicts between higher priority rules and lower priority rules in the set of network service rules that are to be applied to packet flows; constructing a consistent set of network service rules with modified action lists, wherein each action list is modified by prepending an action list of the higher priority rule to an action list of a rule with a filter that defines a longer prefix, wherein if the set of packets associated with the higher priority rule is equal to the set of packets associated with the lower priority rule, constructing the set of networking service rules involves creating a new action list for the higher priority rule by prepending the action list of the higher priority rule to the action list of the lower priority rule; and applying the consistent set of rules to a switching mechanism to facilitate packet flow management.