Patent ID: 7801155

Claim:
A device-implemented routing system comprising: a plurality of device-implemented routing resources, including: device-implemented logic resources including routing processes to determine routing for received packets and forwarding processes to forward the received packets to an appropriate destination; and device-implemented physical resources comprising control resources and data resources, the control resources including at least one routing table and the data resources including physical specifications of the routing system; and a plurality of device-implemented virtual routers to reconfigurably share the device-implemented routing resources, among the device-implemented virtual routers, in accordance with a plurality of programmably modifiable resource sharing configurations to be reconfigurably modified by a user, in order to implement different device-implemented virtual router configurations based on different sets of network requirements, where the programmably modifiable resource sharing configurations specify which of the routing processes, the forwarding processes, the control resources, and the data resources are to be shared between the plurality of device-implemented virtual routers and specify which of the routing processes, the forwarding processes, the control resources, and the data resources are not to be shared between the plurality of device-implemented virtual routers.