US Patent 11979323 System and method for programming packet forwarding hardware

A switching system manager programmed to obtain a base lookup data structure comprising nodes that enumerate all prefixes of a first traffic management policy of a first type and all prefixes of a second traffic management policy of a second type, modify the base lookup data structure based on a first set of inheritance rules associated with the first traffic management policy to generate an updated lookup data structure comprising first traffic management policy label allocations, modify the updated lookup data structure based on a second set of inheritance rules associated with the second traffic management policy to generate a combined lookup data structure comprising the first traffic management policy label allocations and second traffic management policy label allocations, program packet classification hardware of the switching system to adapt the switching system to process packets based on the combined lookup data structure.