Low Power TCAM Forwarding Engine for IP Packets

Ternary Content-Addressable Memories are becoming very popular for designing high-throughput address lookup engines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite the TCAMs speed, their high power consumption is their major drawback. In this document, we presented a novel architecture for a TCAM-based IP forwarding engine. We have shown significant reduction in memory usage based on the prefix compaction and architectural design. We designed a heuristic to match entries in TCAM stages so that only a bounded number of entries are looked up during the search operation. A fast incremental update scheme has been introduced that is time bounded. The memory requirements and power consumption for router architecture have been outlined.. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table´s power consumption.