Multi-zone caches for accelerating IP routing table lookups

The key steps in routing an IP packet are: determining which outgoing interface should be used to forward the packet, switching the packet to that interface, and scheduling the packet for transmission on the outgoing link. The first step requires comparing the destination address to those in a routing table to find the best match. This step can be accelerated by caching the results of recent lookups, and referencing the cache instead of recomputing the lookup. We document a new cache organization especially suited to the address reference behavior of IP traffic, and report performance results for caches based on this new design approach. The new cache design reported shows miss ratios approximately one-half those of conventional caches.

[1]  D. C. Feldmeier,et al.  Improving gateway performance with a routing-table cache , 1988, IEEE INFOCOM '88,Seventh Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communcations Societies. Networks: Evolution or Revolution?.

[2]  Butler W. Lampson,et al.  IP lookups using multiway and multicolumn search , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[3]  Bernhard Plattner,et al.  Scalable high speed IP routing lookups , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[4]  Gunnar Karlsson,et al.  Fast address look-up for internet routers , 1998, Broadband Communications.

[5]  George Varghese,et al.  Faster IP lookups using controlled prefix expansion , 1998, SIGMETRICS '98/PERFORMANCE '98.

[6]  George C. Polyzos,et al.  Traffic characteristics of the T1 NSFNET backbone , 1993, IEEE INFOCOM '93 The Conference on Computer Communications, Proceedings.

[7]  Paul Francis,et al.  Fast routing table lookup using CAMs , 1993, IEEE INFOCOM '93 The Conference on Computer Communications, Proceedings.

[8]  Kimberly Claffy,et al.  Internet traffic characterization , 1994 .

[9]  Nick McKeown,et al.  Routing lookups in hardware at memory access speeds , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[10]  Raj Jain,et al.  Characteristics of Destination Address Locality in Computer Networks: A Comparison of Caching Schemes , 1990, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[11]  Tzi-cker Chiueh,et al.  High-performance IP routing table lookup using CPU caching , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[12]  kc claffy,et al.  Application of sampling methodologies to network traffic characterization , 1993, SIGCOMM 1993.

[13]  Svante Carlsson,et al.  Small forwarding tables for fast routing lookups , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[14]  Bill Lin,et al.  IP caching for terabit speed routers , 1999, Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042).

[15]  Mukesh Singhal,et al.  A novel cache architecture to support layer-four packet classification at memory access speeds , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[16]  Tzi-cker Chiueh,et al.  Cache memory design for network processors , 2000, Proceedings Sixth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. HPCA-6 (Cat. No.PR00550).