A scalable and small forwarding table for fast IP address lookups

IP address lookup is an important design issue for the high performance Internet routers. The most important function of routers is to determine the output port of an incoming IP packet according to its destination address. In this paper, we propose a scalable and simple forwarding table structure for fast hardware-based IP address lookup which reduces memory requirements and memory access times. Proposed scheme requires maximum two memory access times in the worst case to finish an IP address lookup. And it consumes about 0.6 /spl sim/ 1.1 M Bytes memory for large routing tables with 16,000 /spl sim/ 43,000 routing prefixes when any compression method is not used.