Multiway range trees: scalable IP lookup with fast updates

In this paper, we introduce a new IP lookup scheme with worst-case search and update time of O(log n), where n is the number of prefixes in the forwarding table. Our scheme is based on a new data structure, a multiway range tree. While existing lookup schemes are good for IPv4, they do not scale well in both lookup speed and update costs when addresses grow longer as in the IPv6 proposal. Thus our lookup scheme is the first lookup scheme to offer fast lookups and updates for IPv6 while remaining competitive for IPv4.