A table based abstraction layer is interposed between applications and the packet forwarding hardware driver layer. All behavior and configuration of packet forwarding to be implemented in the hardware layer is articulated as fields in tables of the table based abstraction layer, and the higher level application software interacts with the hardware through the creation of and insertion and deletion of elements in these tables. The structure of the tables in the abstraction layer has no direct functional meaning to the hardware, but rather the tables of the table based abstraction layer simply exist to receive data to be inserted by the applications into the forwarding hardware. Information from the tables is extracted by the packet forwarding hardware driver layer and used to populate physical offset tables that may then be installed into the registers and physical tables utilized by the hardware to perform packet forwarding operations.