The analysis and design of fast route lookup algorithms for high performance router

Increased bandwidth in the Internet puts great demands on network routers. One limitation of router performance is the route lookup mechanism. The IP routing requires that the router perform a longest prefix matching on the address lookup in order to determine the packet's next hop. In this paper, with the analysis and comparison of several kinds of route lookup algorithms, we introduce a fast configurable route lookup algorithm that well meets the design requirements of the high performance router. This algorithm can be applied to many different environments by configuring the evaluation coefficient.