What is the chief advantage of using virtual packets instead of frames?

The router can't transfer a copy of a frame from one kind of network to another since the frame formats be not similar. More significantly, the router cannot simply reformat the frame header since the two networks may utilize incompatible address format.

To overcome heterogeneity, Internet protocol software describes an inter packet format which is independent of the underlying hardware. This is termed as virtual packet and it can be transfer red across the underlying hardware. The underlying hardware doesn't recognize or understand the Internet packet format; the protocol software handles and creates Internet packets.