US Patent 7583616 Network unit for forwarding an ethernet packet

An extractor extracts from the payload of the Layer 2 packet a destination Layer 3 address of the Layer 3 packet. A forwarding engine, for in response to the extraction, with the destination Layer 3 address retrieves from a forwarding database an associated interface. The forwarding database includes at least one association between one of the plurality of interfaces and at least one Layer 3 address. Upon reception of the destination Layer 3 address having a full match with one of the Layer 3 addresses, the forwarding database provides the interface which is associated to the Layer 3 address. The network unit forwards the Layer 2 packet to the provided associated interface.