Design algorithms for multi-zone IP address caches

The multi-zone cache is a new architecture for IP address caches that has been shown to have significantly better performance than standard single zone caches in this application. This new architecture presents three more degrees of freedom when specifying a design, in addition to the size of the cache. These are the number of zones, the size of each zone, and the range of prefix lengths of the addresses cached in each zone. We present analytical models that can be used to make decisions about these values.