Patent ID: 6879590

Claim:
An apparatus facilitating aggregation of at least two physical links into a logical link, comprising at least one native link interface operative to: receive native flows and transform the native flow into a plurality of user cells, a link bonding engine operative to: receive the plurality of user cells from the at least one native link interface, associate a sequence number to each of the plurality of user cells, schedule the plurality of user cells for transmission across one or more bonded links, at least two bonded link interfaces, wherein the at least two bonded link interfaces are operative to: receive user cells from the link bonding engine, aggregate the user cells into bonded link frames, wherein the bonded link frame header includes the sequence number associated with the first user cell in the bonded link frame, and transmit the bonded link frames across a physical link, wherein the at least two bonded link interfaces aggregate a maximum number of cells into a given bonded link frame, wherein the maximum number of cells is determined relative to the speed of the physical link and the size of the resulting bonded link frame, and wherein the link bonding engine schedules the plurality of user cells for transmission across the bonded links by arbitrating among the at least two bonded link interfaces, wherein the number of cells passed to each of the bonded link frames is the maximum number of cells that each bonded link interface aggregates into a bonded link frame.