Patent ID: 7706271

Claim:
An apparatus for transmitting packets, comprising: a plurality of line cards which have interfaces for transmitting and receiving packets; switches connected to said plurality of line cards; a plurality of extension function processors connected to said switches, the extension function processors performing processing to be executed on a higher layer than a layer on which a received packet is transferred; and a statistic information collecting processor connected to said switches, said statistic information collecting processor including means for analyzing header information imparted to said packets for each flow, and means for counting an amount of packets for each flow to be transmitted or received through said interfaces, wherein said statistic information collecting processor predicts the amount of packets for each flow to be received by said plurality of interfaces from said header information and said amount of packets for each flow which have been analyzed, and wherein on the basis of said predicted amount of packets for each flow received by all of the line cards, an extension function processor to which the packets for each flow are transmitted is selected from the extension function processors and implements processing on the packets so as to allocate to each extension function processor uniformly an amount of traffic that is processed in each extension function processor.