Patent ID: 7342916

Claim:
A network device for routing mobile IP packets, the network device comprising: a control plane processor; a forwarding plane processor coupled to the control plane processor, the forwarding plane processor to maintain a binding cache to associate original destination addresses with respective replacement destination address, based on information obtained from one or more routers, the forwarding plane processor also to maintain a forwarding table to associate destination addresses with output interfaces of the network device; and a fastpath engine responsive to the control plane processor, the fastpath engine capable of operations comprising: receiving, a mobile IP packet addressed to a destination address; looking for the destination address of the mobile IP packet in the binding cache to determine if an entry exists to associate a replacement destination address with the destination address for the mobile IP packet; encapsulating the mobile IP packet to the replacement destination address, in response to finding the entry for the mobile IP packet in the binding cache; looking for the replacement destination address in the forwarding table, to determine if an entry exists to associate an output interface with the replacement destination address; forwarding the encapsulated mobile IP packet to the replacement destination address obtained from the binding cache, via the output interface obtained from the forwarding table; and routing the mobile IP packet to the forwarding plane processor, in response to finding no entry for the mobile IP packet in the binding cache; wherein the forwarding plane processor is capable of routing the mobile IP packet to the control plane processor; and the control plane processor is capeable of instructing the forwarding plane processor to add an entry for the mobile IP packet to the binding cache maintained by the forwarding plane processor.