High-performance TCAM-based IP lookup engines

IP lookup is a key packet processing task in IP routers. To achieve high performance, it has been proposed to use TCAMs to implement IP-lookup accelerators. In this paper, in addition to the state-of-art MSMB-LPT scheme for TCAM-based IP lookup, M-MSMB-LPT and MSMB-LPT-I schemes are proposed and studied. Using realistic Internet packet traces, it is shown that MSMB-LPT, M-MSMB-LPT and MSMB-LPT-I schemes with different parameters constitute a solution space for constructing a wide-range of high-performance TCAM-based IP lookup engines. Under cost, performance and scalability constraints best IP lookup engine can be selected from this solution space.