PCIU: An efficient packet classification algorithm with an incremental update capability

Packet classification plays a crucial role for a number of network services such as policy based routing, firewalls and traffic billing to name a few. However, classification can be a bottleneck in the above mentioned applications if not implemented properly and efficiently. In this work we propose PCIU, a novel algorithm, which improves upon previous published algorithms. PCIU provides lower pre-processing time, lower memory consumption, ease of incremental rule update, and reasonable classification time compared to published work. The maximum memory to accommodate 10,000 rules in the worst case is less than 2.5 MB. The proposed algorithm was evaluated and compared to several techniques such as RFC and HiCut using several benchmarks. Results obtained indicate that PCIU outperforms these algorithms in terms of speed, memory usage, incremental update capability and pre-processing time.