Power-Efficient TCAM Partitioning for IP Lookups with Incremental Updates

Abstract. Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) provide a fast mechanism for IP lookups and a simple management for route updates. The high power consumption problem can be resolved by pro-viding a TCAM partitioning technique that selectively addresses smaller portions of a TCAM. This paper proposes a 2-level TCAM architecture using prefix comparison rule to partition the routing table into a number of buckets of possibly equal sizes. The 2-level architecture results in a 2-step lookup process. The first step determines which bucket is used to search the input IP. The second step only searches the IP in the de-termined bucket from the first step. The prefix partitioning algorithm provides an incremental update. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has lower power consumption than the existing TCAM parti-tioning algorithms.