An active semiconductor device, such as, buried heterostructure semiconductor lasers, LEDs, modulators, photodiodes, heterojunction bipolar transistors, field effect transistors or other active devices, comprise a plurality of semiconductor layers formed on a substrate with one of the layers being an active region. The resource management mechanism employs the abstraction of an activity which serves as the basis for granting resource reservations and for accounting. The terminal elements are disposed in a metal layer that is formed over the conversion elements. The PLM also includes a PLM controller, which, responsive to an external command, applies a search value to a sub-set of the CAM entries. The method also comprises determining a difference between the gain value of the current signal segment and the previous signal segment and determining whether the difference exceeds a threshold. The forwarding device forwards the response packet to the client.