egress engine 330 to perform a look up using the tag value and thereby determine from a smaller more easily scaleable table how to process the packet no lookup of ovc specific processing data is required as the ovc is directly associated via conventional mechanisms and or logic in the control plane with the nch in an alternate embodiment dedicated circuits and or software functions within the egress engine 330 read the tag value directly and modify egress processing according to the tag type and tag parameter contained therein the tag type is thus analogous to an instruction on how to process the packet with additional parameters supplied via the tag parameter specialized packet processing is thus enabled without reference to the inadequate ovc table used in the prior art the type of processing needed and any necessary parametric inputs of constraints are supplied directly by the tag value in a form readily useable by the egress engine as there needs only be a small number of tag values corresponding to the limited types of packet processing and encapsulation used in the atm art and their related and equally limited parameters the tag approach of the present invention efficiently provides a scaleable alternative to the over constrained architectures used today fig4 shows a flowchart the conventional ingress processing procedure 400 used in all embodiments of the present invention procedure 400 begins on packet reception in the ingress engine where conventional packet parsing and validation e g error checking is performed.