Patent ID: 8811376

Claim:
A packet transmitting apparatus comprising: a plurality of ports to transfer a packet from or to an external device; a packet processing unit operable to determine, when two or more packets having a same source-destination combination are received in two or more of the plurality of ports, a packet that is received earliest amongst the two or more packets having same source-destination combination in one of the plurality of ports as being a previous arrival packet; a previous arrival group judging unit operable to determine, as being previous arrival ports, two or more of the plurality of ports satisfying a previous arrival port condition in association with an elapsed time since a received time of a first packet determined as the previous arrival packet, used for determining the previous arrival ports; and a learning unit to learn an optimum path in accordance with a previous arrival port learning system that learns, as the previous arrival ports, the two or more of the plurality of ports satisfying the previous arrival port condition in which unlearned packets are received in association with a source address of the packet.