Dynamic Multi-Field Packet Classification Authors: Jan van Lunteren, Ton Engbersen

© 2002 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author’s copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Dynamic Multi-Field Packet Classification Abstract — Emerging Internet applications create the need for advanced packet classifiers. This paper investigates the mechanisms that determine the performance of state-of-the-art multi-field classification methods, and proposes a novel scheme called P 2 C for packet classification at OC-192 and OC-768 speeds. P 2 C combines the strengths of embedded memory and ternary CAM technologies to achieve very high storage efficiency while maintaining fast incremental updates. Key feature of the new scheme is its ability to adapt to the complexity of a classification rule set, while providing effective control over the update dynamics and storage requirements at the granularity of individual rules. This makes P 2 C suitable for a broad range of applications. I