An efficient distributed architecture for forwarding packets. The packet to be forwarded arrives in an ingress port, is processed by an ingress forwarding engine, transferred to an egress forwarding engine, and then transmitted via an egress port. An address-based lookup at the ingress forwarding engine identifies the correct egress forwarding engine and also identifies a translation index specifying the forwarding equivalence class (e.g., combination of address prefix and mask) of the packet. The egress forwarding engine then uses the translation index as a memory pointer to recover adjacency information with which to rewrite the packet header. The egress forwarding engine may maintain its adjacency information entirely locally without the need to share the information or propagate updates to ingress forwarding engines. This approach results in a scalable and highly efficient packet forwarding architecture.