Patent ID: 7362763

Claim:
A router for interconnecting N interfacing peripheral devices, said router comprising: a switch fabric; and a plurality of routing nodes coupled to said switch fabric, each of said routing nodes comprising: a plurality of physical medium device (PMD) modules to transmit data packets to and receiving data packets from selected ones of said N interfacing peripheral devices; an input-output processing (IOP) module coupled to said PMD modules and said switch fabric, wherein said IOP module routes said data packets between said PMD modules and said switch fabric and between said PMD modules; and a classification module associated with said IOP module for classifying a first data packet received from said IOP module, wherein said classification module causes said IOP module to forward said first data packet based on said classification, and wherein said classification module replaces at least one of: a medium access control (MAC) address and an Internet Protocol (IP) address of said first data packet with a replacement address selected from a pool of addresses associated with said router.