The present invention relates to a network device that supports software defined networking (SDN) and a packet processing method in the network device. The network device in accordance with the present invention includes: a flow table configured to store a processing action for each flow; and a packet processing module configured to search the flow table for a flow entry matched with a packet being received to determine a list of processing actions for the packet. Here, the packet processing module is configured to use inheritance relationship information between flows defined in the flow table to generate an action list that includes one or more actions for the packet in order to determine the processing actions for the packet.