Patent ID: 8228916

Claim:
A method of switching frames at a plurality of switches in a communications network, comprising: receiving a frame at a first switch, the frame having an Media Access Control (MAC) header including at least one MAC address, the MAC address having an address portion which is divided into a plurality of sub-fields; extracting at the first switch, frame-contained destination information from a first sub-field of the plurality of sub-fields; making a switching decision at the first switch based on the frame-contained destination information extracted from the first sub-field to determine an output port of the first switch over which the frame should be forwarded onto the communication network without performing a lookup operation in a forwarding table based on the entire address portion of the MAC address; transmitting the frame from the determined output port onto the communication network to a second switch; receiving the forwarded frame at the second switch; extracting at the second switch, frame-contained destination information from a second sub-field of the plurality of sub-fields, the second sub-field being distinct from the first sub-field; and making a switching decision at the second switch based on the extracted frame-contained destination information to determine an output port of the second switch over which the frame should be forwarded onto the communication network without performing a lookup operation in a forwarding table based on the entire address portion of the MAC address.