An ultra high throughput and power efficient TCAM-based IP lookup engine

Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) is widely used in high-speed route lookup engines. However, restricted by the memory access speed, the route lookup engines for next-generation terabit routers demand exploiting parallelism among multiple TCAMs. Traditional parallel methods always incur excessive redundancy and high power consumption. We propose An original TCAM-based IP lookup scheme that achieves an ultra high lookup throughput and a high utilization of the memory while being power efficient. In our multichip scheme, we devise a load-balanced TCAM table construction algorithm together with an adaptive load balancing mechanism. The power efficiency is well controlled by decreasing the number of TCAM entries triggered in each lookup operation. Using 133 MHz TCAM chips and given 25% more TCAM entries than the original route table, the proposed scheme achieves a lookup throughput of up to 533 Mpps and is simple for ASIC implementation.