Patent ID: 8064458

Claim:
A method of processing a packet at a network element, the method comprising the steps of: receiving the packet at an Internet Protocol (IP) Multinetting port of the network element from a host over a local area network; determining whether the packet contains a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) Identifier (ID) corresponding to an IP Multinetting VLAN ID on the local area network; determining whether the packet has a source address included in one of a plurality of IP subnets assigned to the IP Multinetting VLAN ID; and if the packet was received at the IP Multinetting port, contains the VLAN ID corresponding to the IP Multinetting VLAN ID, and the source address is included in one of the plurality of IP subnets assigned to the IP Multinetting VLAN ID, performing VLAN Translation so that the packet contains a VLAN ID of the one of the plurality of IP subnets instead of the IP Multinetting VLAN ID before passing the changed packet internally to be processed by the network element.