Bloom-Bird: A scalable open source router based on Bloom filter

Flexibility and configurability behind the open-source routers has extended their usage via the networks. On the other hand, the need for high-performance and high-speed routers has become a fundamental issue due to significant growth of information exchange through the Internet and intranets. Therefore, in this paper we employ Bloom filter to accelerate the Bird open-source routing software. Bloom-Bird (our improved version of Bird) is proposed which uses an extra stage before its IP lookups using Bloom filter to accelerate IP lookup mechanism. Based on the best of our knowledge this is the first application of Bloom filter on Bird software router. Moreover, Bloom-Bird can scale its Bloom filter capacity therefore false positive errors are handled in an acceptable rate. It shows up to 93% speedup for IP lookups over standard Bird when number of inserted nodes into its internal FIB (Forwarding Information Base) becomes huge.

I. Introduction

The need for high-performance and high-speed routers has become a fundamental issue due to significant growth of information exchange through the Internet and intranets. Due to adoption of CIDR (Class-less Inter-domain Routing), routers need to find best match between different prefix lengths that may differ from lengths 1 to 128 based on what version of IP and which prefix is used. This process of finding matching IPs is time consuming and a lot of hardware (e.g. TCAM and SRAM) and algorithmic approaches (e.g. binary searches) are proposed in the literature as will be discussed further in the related works.