Effective bit selection methods for improving performance of packet classifications on IP routers

In recent years, high-performance routers are needed as well as increasing the link capacity to keep up with the Internet traffic explosion. Routers are preferable to store statistics of the incoming/outgoing traffic to realize the intelligent or policy-based services in the Internet. In this paper, we propose a new packet classification solution, which uses the combination of CAM and DRAM memories. Unlike other algorithms, we do not search the classifier by selecting the front bits, but select bits arbitrary from the classifier as the search key in the CAM. For this purpose, we propose new bit selection methods. Through simulation results, we show that our bit selection methods can decrease the delay of classification.