Patent ID: 7668115

Claim:
A switching apparatus which receives an input packet from a network at a receiving port and transmits a processed packet in response to the input packet to the network, comprising: an input packet checking unit to determine whether an input packet from the receiving port is a packet addressed to the switching apparatus and having a predetermined virtual local area network ID; a packet reception processing unit to generate a reply packet as a response to the input packet from the input packet checking unit when the input packet is determined as being a request packet having a virtual local area network tag and transmitted for a ping test via the network to the switching apparatus, the packet reception processing unit setting a same priority class in a virtual local area network tag of the reply packet as that in the virtual local area network tag of the request packet; and a priority control unit to perform priority control on the reply packet from the packet reception processing unit based on the priority class in the virtual local area network tag of the reply packet.