An Efficient IP Lookup Architecture With Fast Update Using Single-Match TCAMs

Abstract. The increasing demand for new multimedia services requires the higher performance routers. The performance of Internet router highly depends on the efficiency of update operations as well as lookup operations on IP for-warding table. While IP lookup schemes based on TCAM(Ternary Content Ad-dressable Memory) can achieve high speed lookup, they usually need more complex update operations because of the ordering constraint on prefixes. In this paper we propose an efficient IP lookup architecture to provide fast update using a new type of TCAM named single-match TCAM. Also, we present elaborated algorithms to guarantee that each single-match TCAM generates at most one match for a given destination IP address. In our scheme the updating overhead can be reduced because there is no ordering constraint on the single-match TCAM. We evaluate as well the update performance of our scheme through simulation under real forwarding tables and update data