A load balancing technique uniformly distributes data transmitted by a
server over a plurality of underlying physical links of a virtual
interface or aggregate within a computer network. According to the
invention, the unit of data granularity is preferably a datagram, rather
than an Internet protocol (IP) fragment or packet. The load balancing
technique implements a round robin scheduling policy among the links
based on an identifier (ID) associated with each datagram. As a result,
the technique ensures that all fragments of a datagram are forwarded over
the same physical link of the aggregate on the basis of a similar IP ID.