A novel reconfigurable hardware architecture for IP address lookup

IP address lookup is one of the most challenging problems of Internet routers. In this paper, an IP lookup rate of 263 Mlps (Million lookups per second) is achieved using a novel architecture on reconfigurable hardware platform. A partial reconfiguration may be needed for a small fraction of route updates. Prefixes can be added or removed at a rate of 2 million updates per second, including this hardware reconfiguration overhead. A route update may fail due to the physical resource limitations. In this case, which is rare if the architecture is properly configured initially, a full reconfiguration is needed to allocate more resources to the lookup unit.