Patent ID: 8161156

Claim:
A computing device-implemented method, comprising: communicating, by the computing device, with feature peers, associated with a network, to locate, using a table, the feature peers and obtain information associated with the feature peers; receiving, by the computing device, a customer packet; determining, by the computing device and based on the feature peer information, which of the feature peers support a feature associated with the customer packet; selecting, by the computing device and from the determined feature peers, a set of feature peers for the customer packet to traverse; associating, by the computing device and with the customer packet, an additional packet used for delivering the feature associated with the customer packet; and forwarding, by the computing device, the customer packet and the additional packet to one of the feature peers in the selected set of feature peers, where the set of feature peers delivers the customer packet to a destination address associated with the customer packet, where forwarding the customer packet and the additional packet includes: adding a feature header to the customer packet to create a modified customer packet; and forwarding, based on the feature header, the modified customer packet to the one of the feature peers in the set of feature peers.