Patent 7203192 was granted and assigned to Fortinet on April, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Methods and Systems are provided for steering network packets and bridging media channels to a single processing resource. A mapping associates a processing resource with a network interface module (Netmod) or a number of line interface ports included within the Netmod. In one embodiment, the mapping is configurable within the processing resource and pushed to the Netmod. The Netmod uses the mapping to steer network packets to the processing resource when the packets conform to the mapping. Moreover, the mapping can be used to identify a specific process that is to be performed against the packets once the processing resource receives the steered packets from the Netmod.