Patent ID: 8072984

Claim:
An Ethernet switching and forwarding method, comprising: receiving, by an ingress port, an Ethernet message, allocating to the message a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tag which is uniform at the ingress port in accordance with attribute of the ingress port; determining a forwarding mode in accordance with the VLAN tag and a VLAN attribute table, wherein the VLAN attribute table defines a forwarding plane to which the VLAN tag belongs; sending the message to one of forwarding planes corresponding to the forwarding mode, each of which forwarding planes corresponds to a forwarding mode; determining, by the forwarding plane, an egress port in accordance with the received message and the forwarding mode, and sending the message to the egress port in the forwarding mode; and encapsulating, by the egress port, the message in accordance with an attribute of the egress port, and forwarding the message; wherein the ingress port comprises a port attribute table in which table entries of port types and table entries of VLAN tag processing rules comprising insertion, deletion, modification or replacement are set, and the VLAN attribute table in which forwarding modes are set; and the ingress port allocates to the received message the VLAN tag, which is uniform at the ingress port and indicates the forwarding mode, by inserting, deleting, modifying, or replacing the VLAN tag, in accordance with the port attribute table and the VLAN attribute table.