Compressing IP forwarding tables with fast and bounded update

The size of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) maintained at backbone routers is experiencing an exponential growth, and various solutions have been proposed in the literature. The main shortcoming of FIB compression is the update overhead. Only when the update speed of FIB compression algorithms is sufficiently fast and bounded, the probability of packet loss incurred by FIB compression operations during update can be completely avoided. However, no prior FIB compression algorithm can bound the worst case of update, and hence a mature solution with complete avoidance of packet loss is still yet to be identified. To address this issue, we propose the Unite and Split (US) compression algorithm to enable fast update with bounded worst case performance. Experimental results show that the average update speed of the US algorithm is almost the same as that of the binary trie without any compression.