DEVICE AND METHOD FOR RELAYING PACKET

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a technique capable of reducing deviation in communication load. SOLUTION: Arithmetic processing is performed using seed information including at least one of destination information and transmission-source information related to a received packet. Then a physical port to transmit the reception packet is selected, based upon the arithmetic result, out of a plurality of candidate ports which can possibly deliver the reception packet to a destination specified with the destination information among a plurality of physical ports. Further, a port group to be used to transmit the reception packet may be selected, based upon the arithmetic result, out of a plurality of port groups comprising one or more physical ports including the candidate port, and also including mutually different candidate ports. Here, an arithmetic expression used for the arithmetic processing may be changed. COPYRIGHT: (C)2008,JPO&INPIT