Patent ID: 7383353

Claim:
A method of load balancing in a network comprising a plurality of switches coupled together by individual links and trunks comprising individual links, the method including: (a) assigning a cost value to each link in the network based on a system criteria; (b) assigning to each trunk a cost value that is equal to the cost value of one of the links in the trunk, wherein the links in the trunk have equal cost values; (c) computing the total cost of each path through the network between a pair of switches; (d) from a plurality of paths, determining multiple paths having a total cost that is lower than the total cost of all other paths; and (e) balancing traffic load among said multiple lowest cost paths; wherein, if said multiple lowest cost paths comprises one path that includes a trunk and another path that does not include a trunk, includes assigning more traffic to the path that includes the trunk.