Efficient cache structures of IP routers to provide policy-based services

The policy-based service is becoming more important for the Internet shared by various applications. To realize the policy-based service, the router is required to forward packets according to the requirements of the traffic flow that the packet belongs to. However, the packet (and flow) classification easily becomes a bottleneck because the router is necessary to handle multiple fields within the packet. We propose a new packet classification algorithm capable of following the packet forwarding rate of the high-speed routers with the commercially available CPU, RAM, and cache memories. Through our experiments, we show the effects of parameters of the cache structure on the processing rate of the packet classification