Patent 7599364 was granted and assigned to Agere Systems on October, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An apparatus and method are provided for extracting connection information from a traffic header in a communications network. The apparatus includes a first storage element containing a first look-up table for determining a first data packet header offset and data size for extracting a communications protocol type from the header and a second storage element containing a second look-up table for determining from the communications protocol type a second data packet header offset and second data size for extracting a connection address from the header. The storage elements may be in the form of content-addressable memories. Exception handling and hardware initialization can be controlled by a system processor.