Patent 7339931 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on March, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A packet transfer apparatus connected to an internal subnetwork formed by a set of broadcast segments each accommodating terminals and for transferring, when a MAC frame including a IP address which designates a destination terminal connected to one of the segments is received from a terminal connected to another segment in the internal subnetwork, an IP packet in the MAC frame to the segment connected to the destination terminal in accordance with a terminal management table which indicates a relation of address information of each of the terminals belonging to the internal subnetwork and the segment to which the terminal is connected.