Patent ID: 8111649

Claim:
A method for routing packets, comprising: receiving a packet at an input port of a router which is part of a network, wherein the packet originated from a source system and is destined to a destination system, and wherein the packet includes a traffic-management field that contains a value that is provided by the source system, wherein the router uses the value in the traffic management field to influence how the packet is routed through the network without explicitly specifying nodes that the packet should traverse; determining a set of output ports of the router that are associated with different paths to the destination system; selecting an output port, from the set of output ports associated with the destination system, which involves: computing a hash value which selects an output port based in part on a header of the packet; adding the value from the traffic-management field in the packet to the hash value to generate an adjusted value; and based on the adjusted value, selecting a path in the network for routing the packet as influenced by the source system; and sending the packet through the selected output port.