Patent ID: 7715409

Claim:
A method, comprising: mapping, on a gateway that is communicatively coupled to a physical Local Area Network (LAN) using one or more network interfaces, network addresses of a plurality of network devices operating in the physical LAN to a plurality of different logical domains of the same physical LAN; after performing said mapping, receiving an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) packet over a particular one of the one or more network interfaces; associating the received ARP packet with an entry in the mapping by extracting information from a source Internet Protocol (IP) address field of the ARP packet and comparing the extracted information together with an identifier for the particular one of the network interfaces to the mapping, wherein the extracted information is limited to information included in the source IP address field of the ARP packet and the association is made using no other information from the received ARP packet other than the information included in the source IP address field of the ARP packet, and wherein said association allows the gateway to perform a logical domain classification for the ARP packet independently of whether the network devices are configured to mark ARP packets according to the partitioning of the physical LAN into the plurality of logical domains; providing a plurality of separate ARP tables that are each associated with a different one of the logical domains; and selecting one of the ARP tables to be updated according to the received ARP packet, wherein the ARP table is selected according to the association, and updating the selected ARP table according to the ARP packet.