US Patent 7760632 Device and method for relaying packets

Packets are relayed using a network relay device including a plurality of interface units. Each of the interface units includes one or more physical ports for connection to a line, and a bandwidth controller configured to control transmission bandwidth for packets received by the physical ports. Furthermore, a single specific physical port is selected as the output physical port from the distributed-control logical port based on output port group information unique to the output port group including the distributed-control logical port.