7. The method of claim 6 , 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.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the multiple-field source comprises a data packet having single fields in its header.