Patent attributes
A method of forwarding packets by a physical network switch is provided. The method assigns egress ports that connect the network switch to each particular next hop to a weighted-cost multipathing (WCMP) group associated with the particular next hop. The method assigns weights to each egress port in each WCMP group according to the capacity of each path that connects the egress port to the next hop associated with the WCMP group and normalizes the weights over a range of values. For each packet received at the network switch, the method identifies the WCMP group associated with a next hop destination of the packet. The method calculates a hash value of a set of fields in the packet header and uses the hash value to perform a range lookup in the identified WCMP group to select an egress port for forwarding the packet to the next hop.
