Patent ID: 8483051

Claim:
A network relay apparatus, comprising: multiple ports, each being provided to send and receive a frame to and from one of multiple external devices; a frame processor configured to set a flooding target corresponding to an attribute of a port that sends the received frame, and to perform flooding on the basis of the flooding target, in order to relay a received frame that is received via one of the multiple ports as a receiving port; a port attribute storage configured to store a port attribute in correlation with each of the multiple ports; a flooding target storage configured to store a flooding target set in advance with regard to each port attribute; a media access control (MAC) address storage configured to store a MAC address of each of the multiple external devices in correlation with one of the multiple ports; a learning manager configured to retrieve an attribute of the receiving port from the port attribute storage and register the retrieved attribute in correlation with a corresponding port in the MAC address storage, so as to implement a learning process with regard to the MAC address storage; a flooding indication storage configured to store requirement or non-requirement of flooding in correlation with each of the multiple ports, wherein: the frame processor refers to information registered in the port attribute storage and in the flooding target storage when the flooding target is set, the frame processor performs a destination search of the MAC address storage to specify a transmit port and a attribute of the transmit port, and the frame processor retrieves requirement or non-requirement of flooding from the flooding indication storage based on the specified transmit port, and on retrieval of the requirement of flooding, and sets a flooding destination from retrieval of the flooding target storage based on the specified attribute of the transmit port and performs flooding.