A fast IP routing lookup scheme

A major issue in router design for the next generation Internet is the fast IP address lookup mechanism. The existing scheme by Huang et al. (see Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'99, New York, NY, 1999) performs the IP address lookup in hardware in which the forwarding table can be compressed to fit into a reasonable-size SRAM, and a lookup can be accomplished in three memory accesses. We claim that with a little extra memory, it is able to further reduce the lookup time to two memory accesses.