Abstract: The invention distributes the adjacent-router link interfaces of a network node among several logical routers and provides a node-internal interface between at least two of the logical routers. Each logical router is generally assigned a dedicated subset of the adjacent-router link interfaces of the network node. Thereby, the number of adjacencies related to each logical router is reduced, leading to a reduction in the load on the corresponding routing protocol process of each logical router. The routing protocol processes are preferably executed on seperate processors, one for each logical router. This network node implementation is directly scalable by selecting the number of logical routers and properly dividing the adjacencies of the network node among the logical routers.