Patent ID: 8873567

Claim:
A router device comprising: a first routing engine to receive packets which are to be sent to a destination node; multiple egress ports coupled to the first routing engine, each of the multiple egress ports to couple to another router device having port groups each corresponding to a different respective network path to the destination node, wherein for each of the port groups of the other router device, each egress port of the port group couples the other router device to the destination node via the corresponding network path, wherein one or more of the port groups includes a plurality of egress ports; a first routing table including an entry set for multi-path routing of the packets to the destination node, each entry of the entry set corresponding to a respective one of the multiple egress ports of the router device and to a respective one of the port groups of the other router device, wherein the entry set maps each of the multiple egress ports to a respective one of the port groups in the other router device, wherein the first routing engine includes routing logic to identify for a packet a respective entry of the entry set, to tag the packet by including in the packet a port group identifier for the port group of the other router device which corresponds to the identified respective entry, and to send the tagged packet via the egress port corresponding to the identified respective entry; and configuration logic to receive split ratio information describing a relative splitting of traffic to the destination node among the port groups, the configuration logic further to create the entry set based on the split ratio information, wherein the configuration logic to create the entry set based on the split ratio information includes the configuration logic to determine an approximation of the relative splitting of traffic to the destination node among the port groups.