DBS: A Bit-level Heuristic Packet Classification Algorithm for High Speed Network

Packet classification is one of the most critical techniques in many network devices such as firewall, IDS and IPS, etc. In order to meet the performance requirement for high speed Internet (even higher than 10 Gbps), practical algorithms must keep better spatial and temporal performance. Moreover, as the size of rule set is increasing to tens of thousands, novel packet classification algorithms must have good scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel packet classification algorithm named DBS (discrete bit selection) which takes a bit level heuristic design to partition the rule set effectively. To the best of our knowledge, DBS is the first try to design a heuristic classification algorithm at bit-level. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, DBS is deployed on a popular multi-core network processor platform, compared with two existing well-known algorithms. Experimental results show that DBS achieves 300% higher throughput than HiCuts and HSM, while the memory requirement is reduced to about 10% averagely. DBS works well especially with large rule set (10K), which trends a good scalability.