Patent ID: 7466699

Claim:
A method of communicating between end-points in a network wherein each one of a plurality of ports in the network is coupled to at least one of the end-points, and wherein a transmission is sent between a source end-point and a destination end-point via a respective source port and a destination port connected by a fabric, the method comprising the steps of: receiving the transmission at the destination port, wherein a payload offset and buffer pool handle are included in a network header received with the transmission, wherein the buffer pool handle is used to determine a specific queue of pool buffers within the destination port; dequeueing a pool buffer descriptor from the queue indicated by the buffer pool handle, wherein the pool buffer descriptor describes a header buffer and a payload buffer within the destination end-point; and decoding the payload offset in the network header to locate a first number of bytes of data in the transmission to be transferred into the header buffer, and a second number of bytes of data to be transferred into the payload buffer.