Patent 6909713 was granted and assigned to Intel on June, 2005 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method and apparatus for receiving data having an address at a network switch having at least one protocol processor, and hashing at least part of the address to obtain an identifier of a protocol processor in the switch. Source address preservation may be used so that data transfers between server and client may be distributed to the same protocol processor in a switch or web appliance by hashing the same address regardless of which header field the address resides in.