718 fig8 c is a diagram illustrating the different fields of an exemplary re formatted original packet 730 which includes a u201c destination mac u201d field 802 u2033 containing the next hop mac a u201c source mac u201d field 804 u2033 containing the router mac for egress vlan a u201c protocol type u201d field 806 containing 0x800 which indicates that the packet 730 is an ip packet 730 a u201c tunnel ip header gre u201d field 812 containing the destination ip address and the source ip address and an u201c original ip header u201d field 808 u2033 note 1 the ttl is decremented within the original ip header field 808 u2033 note 2 the re formatted packet 730 also contains the additional fields 810 9 the fast path handler 716 routes the second re formatted packet 730 to the egress packet logic unit 712 located within the first asic 702 10 11 the egress packet logic unit 712 routes the second re formatted packet 730 to the correct egress port 704 which then forwards the second re formatted packet 730 from a specific tunneled interface on a specific egress path to the next downstream switch which de tunnels the second re formatted packet 730 note the routing of packets within the switches 500 and 700 which use known tunnels has not been shown or described herein plus it should be appreciated that the switches 500 and 700 shown herein include.