IP packet forwarding based on comb extraction scheme

We present an efficient IP packet forwarding technique and its architecture. One forwarding table is decomposed into two balanced smaller sub-forwarding tables by a novel splitting rule. Therefore, an IP lookup can be converted into a pair of small sub-lookups. The output of an incoming packet can be determined by comparing the information, attached to the matching sub-prefixes of both sub-lookups. The sub-lookups and information comparison can perform in parallel. Our approach not only speeds up the Best Matching Prefix (BMP) search, but also reduces storage space at the same time.