An on-chip IP address lookup algorithm

This paper proposes a new data compression algorithm to store the routing table in a tree structure using very little memory. This data structure is tailored to a hardware design reference model presented in this paper. By exploiting the low memory access latency and high bandwidth of on-chip memory, high-speed packet forwarding can be achieved using this data structure. With the addition of pipeline in the hardware, IP address lookup can only be limited by the memory access speed. The algorithm is also flexible for different implementation. Experimental analysis shows that, given the memory width of 144 bits, our algorithm needs only 400kb memory for storing a 20k entries IPv4 routing table and five memory accesses for a search. For a 1M entries IPv4 routing table, 9Mb memory and seven memory accesses are needed. With memory width of 1,068 bits, we estimate that we need 100Mb memory and six memory accesses for a routing table with 1M IPv6 prefixes.