In a service chain scenario, after a service path is specified for some traffic, the traffic passes through a flow distribution node and each service node according to the service path and a specified sequence. However, when packet processing is performed between adjacent nodes of the flow distribution node and service nodes, flow rules between the adjacent nodes may be the same, or an upstream node can support a flow rule of its downstream node, and packet processing performed by the downstream node such as discarding, allowing passing, and forwarding, can also be performed by the upstream node. In many cases, and especially in a case in which flow processing by the upstream node is implemented using hardware, how many actions are performed on a flow is irrelevant to traffic processing performance of the upstream node, which is flow processing performance in brief, or how many actions are performed does not have great impact on flow processing performance. That is, no matter how many actions are performed on the flow by the upstream node, the flow processing performance of the upstream node does not change greatly, for example, flow processing implemented using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). In the foregoing cases, if flow processing performed by the downstream node is deployed in its upstream node, burden of the downstream node can be reduced, and there is no great impact on the flow processing performance of the upstream node. In the foregoing content, the upstream node and the downstream node are two adjacent nodes.
Generally, flow processing by the downstream node may be deployed in its upstream node by performing traffic offloading on the downstream node.
However, in the prior art, no specific solution to traffic offloading on the downstream node is provided. Therefore, it is very difficult to perform traffic offloading on the downstream node.