Automated configuration of point-to-point load balancing between teamed network resources of peer devices

A network device comprising a team of network resources and coupled to one or more peer network devices over a local area network, said network device operable to automatically configure the one or more peer devices to load-balance over its team of network resources data they transmit to said network device, said device further comprising:

• means for multicasting a data frame to the one or more peer devices, the data frame comprising peer data defining attributes of the network device's team of resources;
• and
• means for updating the multicast data frame with new peer data whenever one or more attributes of the network device's team of resources are altered.

A method of automatically configuring one or more peer network devices to load-balance data they transmit to a receiving network device over a local area network, the transmitted data being load-balanced by the transmitting peer device over a team of network resources comprising the receiving network device, the method further comprising:

• multicasting a data frame from the receiving device to the one or more peer devices, the data frame comprising peer data defining one or more attributes of the team of network resources comprising the receiving device;
• and
• updating the multicast data frame with new peer data whenever at least one of the one or more attributes of the receiving device's team of resources is altered.

A method of automatically configuring a network device to load-balance data it transmits over a local area network to one or more peer devices, the data being load-balanced over a team of network resources comprising each of the one or more peer devices, said method comprising:

• receiving data frames at the network device that are multicast by the one or more peer devices, each of the data frames comprising peer data defining one or more attributes of the team comprising the multicasting peer device;
• and
• storing at the network device peer data from the received data frames for each of the one or more multicasting peer devices.

A network device operable to be automatically configured to load-balance data it transmits over a local area network to one or more peer devices, the data being load-balanced over a team of network resources comprising each of the one or more peer devices, said network device comprising:

• means for receiving data frames that are multicast by each of the one or more peer devices, the data frames comprising peer data defining current attributes for the team of the multicasting one of the one or more peer devices;
• and
• means for storing the peer data comprising the received data frames for each of the one or more peer devices as a peer database.