Patent ID: 8068503

Claim:
A network packet steering system, comprising: a plurality of processing resources provided by a network routing/switching device, each of the processing resources comprising a network packet forwarding resource, a network packet routing resource, a network packet encryption/decryption resource or a network packet authentication resource; a plurality of network interfaces of the network routing/switching device; wherein the one or more processing resources are configurable, uniquely identified within the network routing/switching device, and dynamically assigned to one or more of the plurality of network interfaces or to one or more line interface ports associated with the plurality of network interfaces, and wherein those of the one or more network interfaces that have been assigned a processing resource of the plurality of processing resources steer subsequently received incoming network packets to the assigned processing resource of the plurality of processing resources based on the dynamically configured assignment; wherein one or more of the network interfaces that has been assigned a processing resource of the plurality of processing resources uses the dynamically configured assignment to perform one or more filter operations on the incoming network packets before steering the incoming network packets; and wherein the dynamically configured assignment is stored within a volatile memory associated with one or more of the plurality of network interfaces in the form of a table data structure containing a unique identifier/address of the assigned processing resource of the plurality of processing resources.