IPStash: a power-efficient memory architecture for IP-lookup

High-speed routers often use commodity, fully-associative, TCAMs (ternary content addressable memories) to perform packet classification and routing (IP-lookup). We propose a memory architecture called IPStash to act as a TCAM replacement, offering at the same time, better functionality, higher performance, and significant power savings. The premise of our work is that full associativity is not necessary for IP-lookup. Rather, we show that the required associativity is simply a function of the routing table size. We propose a memory architecture similar to set-associative caches but enhanced with mechanisms to facilitate IP-lookup and in particular longest prefix match. To perform longest prefix match efficiently in a set-associative array, we restrict routing table prefixes to a small number of lengths using a controlled prefix expansion technique. Since this inflates the routing tables, we use skewed associativity to increase the effective capacity of our devices. Compared to previous proposals, IPStash does not require any complicated routing table transformations but more importantly, it makes incremental updates to the routing tables effortless. The proposed architecture is also easily expandable. Our simulations show that IPStash is both fast and power efficient compared to TCAMs. Specifically, IPStash devices - built in the same technology as TCAMS - can run at speeds in excess of 600 MHz, offer more than twice the search throughput (>200Msps), and consume up to 35% less power (for the same throughput) than the best commercially available TCAMs when testes with real routing tables and IP traffic.