Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks specially the
Internet. Forwarding IP packets is a valuable and vital function in Internet
routers. Routers extract destination IP address from packets and lookup those
addresses in their own routing table. This task is called IP lookup. Internet
address lookup is a challenging problem due to the increasing routing table
sizes. Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular
for designing high-throughput address lookup-engines on routers: they are fast,
cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite the TCAMs speed, their high power
consumption is their major drawback. In this paper, Multilevel Enabling
Technique (MLET), a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has been
proposed. This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithm
to achieve lower power consumption. The performance evaluation of the proposed
approach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table's power
consumption.Comment: 14 Pages, IJCNC 201