High-Performance Packet Classification for Network-Device Platforms

Recently, many network-device platforms provide a fast SRAM interface for short access latency. However, existing packet classification algorithms achieve high-speed performance by sacrificing the table size; consequently, the entire table is stored in a large DRAM instead of a small SRAM. In this letter, we propose a new partitioning-based packet classification algorithm that generates very small tables and enables the tables to be stored in an SRAM to achieve a very fast speed. Moreover, by removing overhead for the partitioning search, our algorithm provides excellent performance even with DRAMs as compared to other algorithms.