A novel signature-based packet classification

This paper describes a novel signature-based packet classification that can achieve gigabit speed at limited memory consumption. The innovative aspect of signature-based scheme is to extract the rule into an equivalent signature, a unique variable-length bit string with shorter width. Therefore, only a small fraction of a rule is inspected in search, resulting in considerable saving in lookup time as well as providing an effective solution for high dimensional rule. Moreover, the signature-based packet classification can perform well at high dimensions. By running a simulation model that incorporates the publicly available packet traces, we show that the performance of the signature-based scheme can reach 11 million packets per second even in the worst case, when implemented by 3.96 M 10 ns SRAM for 10000 rule four-dimensional classifier. This result demonstrates signature-based scheme is superior to previous approaches