Patent ID: 8243618

Claim:
A computer program product for steering Internet Protocol (IP) packet fragments, wherein the IP packet fragments are components of a series of IP packet fragments, the computer program product comprising: a computer readable storage media; first program instructions to receive a first IP packet fragment at a switch; second program instructions to, in response to determining that the first IP packet fragment does not contain an IP 5-tuple and thus is not a lead packet fragment in the stream of IP packet fragments, push the first IP packet fragment onto a data stack; third program instructions to receive a second IP packet fragment, wherein the second IP packet fragment is received subsequent to the first IP packet fragment; fourth program instructions to, in response to determining that the second IP packet fragment is the lead packet fragment in the stream of IP packet fragments, parse an IP 5-tuple from the second IP packet fragment to steer the second IP packet fragment and the first IP packet fragment to a destination port identified by the IP 5-tuple of the second IP packet fragment; and fifth program instructions to create a fragmentation table, wherein the fragmentation table indexes IP 3-tuples from subsequent IP packet fragments in the stream of IP packet fragments to the IP 5-tuple from the second IP packet fragment; and wherein the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth program instructions are stored on the computer readable storage media.