A method and device are presented for decreasing processing cycles spent forwarding packets of a communication from receive queues to at least one transmit queue of a network interface controller. When received, packets are placed into a receive queue based on property(ies) of a leading packet. Buffer metadata including transmit information is associated with each communication. Processor circuitry transfers the packets from each of the receive queues to a transmit queue and the buffer metadata is used to determine how to transmit the packet and how to process the packet before transmission.