Patent ID: 6999418

Claim:
A method of reducing flooding from a network device, comprising: maintaining an unknown address and a count at a first port of the network device, the unknown address being a network address for which there is no information at the first port identifying another port of the network device to which unicast frames containing the unknown address are to be forwarded, the count identifying the number of times frames containing the unknown address have been flooded from the first port to other ports of the network device; upon receiving a unicast frame containing the unknown address at the first port while the count is less than a predetermined threshold, incrementing the count and flooding the received frame to the other ports of the network device; when the count has reached the predetermined threshold, determining whether there is information at a second one of the other ports of the network device identifying a specific one of the ports of the network device to which unicast frames containing the unknown address are to be forwarded, and if so then transferring the information from the second port to the first port, whereupon the unknown address becomes known at the first port; and upon receiving unicast frames containing the now known address at the first port, forwarding the received frames to only the specific port identified in the information transferred from such other port to the first port.