Efficient hardware architecture for fast IP address lookup

A multigigabit IP router may receive several millions packets per second from each input link. For each packet, the router needs to find the longest matching prefix in the forwarding table in order to determine the packet's next-hop. In this paper, we present an efficient hardware solution for the IP address lookup problem. We model the address lookup problem as a searching problem on a binary-trie. The binary-trie is partitioned into four levels of fixed size 255-node subtrees. We employ a hierarchical indexing structure to facilitate direct access to subtrees in a given level. It is estimated that a forwarding table with 40K prefixes will consume 2.5Mbytes of memory. The searching is implemented using a hardware pipeline with a minimum cycle of 12.5ns if the memory modules are implemented using SRAM. A distinguishing feature of our design is that forwarding table entries are not replicated in the data structure. Hence, table updates can be done in constant time with only a few memory accesses.published_or_final_versio

Partial fillup and search time in LC tries

Andersson and Nilsson introduced in 1993 a level-compressed trie (in short: LC trie) in which a full subtree of a node is compressed to a single node of degree being the size of the subtree. Recent experimental results indicated a 'dramatic improvement' when full subtrees are replaced by partially filled subtrees. In this paper, we provide a theoretical justification of these experimental results showing, among others, a rather moderate improvement of the search time over the original LC tries. For such an analysis, we assume that n strings are generated independently by a binary memoryless source with p denoting the probability of emitting a 1. We first prove that the so called alpha-fillup level (i.e., the largest level in a trie with alpha fraction of nodes present at this level) is concentrated on two values with high probability. We give these values explicitly up to O(1), and observe that the value of alpha (strictly between 0 and 1) does not affect the leading term. This result directly yields the typical depth (search time) in the alpha-LC tries with p not equal to 1/2, which turns out to be C loglog n for an explicitly given constant C (depending on p but not on alpha). This should be compared with recently found typical depth in the original LC tries which is C' loglog n for a larger constant C'. The search time in alpha-LC tries is thus smaller but of the same order as in the original LC tries.Comment: 13 page