Practical Multituple Packet Classification Using Dynamic Discrete Bit Selection

Multituple packet classification is one of the key technologies, and often the performance bottleneck in modern network devices. Devices such as firewalls demand fast packet classification on very complicated rule sets of large size, which is still challenging today. This paper proposes a practical packet classification algorithm named dynamic discrete bit selection (D² BS), which achieves high classification speed while requiring low storage. D² BS employs dynamic heuristic schemes at bit level, to explore the inherent characteristics of the rule sets. D²BS has been implemented on various platforms including Intel-architecture, multicore network processor, and FPGA, and is compared with the state-of-the-art solutions. Experimental results on real-life rule sets show that the memory storage required by D²BS is at least one to two orders of magnitude lower than that of the existing work, while the speed is much higher. With 64-byte Ethernet packet and 10K size ACL rule set, D²BS achieves a throughput over 10 Gbps on Cavium OCTEON CN5860 multicore network processor and over 135 Gbps on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, which outperforms the existing work under the same test environment. All results promise that D²BS is a highly practical solution to satisfy vigorous requirements.