24. The article of manufacture of claim 19 , wherein the multiple-field source comprises a data packet having single fields in its header.
25. The article of manufacture of claim 24 , wherein the operation comprises one of the following: dropping the data packet, mirroring, metering, traffic shaping, rate limiting, accounting, statistics gathering, providing quality of service (QoS), redirecting to a central processing unit (CPU) for further processing, or sampling a subset of the packets to a CPU.