Technique to eliminate sorting in IP packet forwarding devices

This paper presents a solution to eliminate the requirements of sorting by prefix length in IP forwarding devices using ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs). These do away with delays arising from inserting into a sorted list. To achieve this, the routing table entries in the TCAM are split by output port. This solution requires slight modifications to current TCAMs including the elimination of the built-in encoder. Overall, the solution presented reduces the insertion problem to lookup speed while maintaining similar clock rates and storage requirements of the traditional TCAMs.