methods from the fields of hashing and distributed caching it is possible to provide a fully distributed scheme i e all the assignment decisions can be purely deterministic and require only a few basic operations which can be computed at run time at the same time these methods provide load balancing over all available packet processing units ppu 11 to ppu m this can be achieved as described in the following a function f 1 identifier vector maps entries from the identifier vector space to the appropriate packet processing unit ppu 11 to ppu m in order to take into account differences in the performance of each packet processing unit or unequal load distribution a partitioning vector p p 1 p 2 p 3 pm is advantageously introduced the partitioning vector p defines a size of a fraction of the identifier vector space assigned to each packet processing units ppu 11 to ppu m based on the partitioning vector p a weights vector x is computed which is then used in an extended function f 2 identifier vector x the weights vector x is stored in each line card lc 11 to lc n for computing the function f 2 identifier vector x the function f 2 identifier vector x computes the index of the packet processing unit.