SMALTA: practical and near-optimal FIB aggregation

IP Routers use sophisticated forwarding table (FIB) lookup algorithms that minimize lookup time, storage, and update time. This paper presents SMALTA, a practical, near-optimal FIB aggregation scheme that shrinks forwarding table size without modifying routing semantics or the external behavior of routers, and without requiring changes to FIB lookup algorithms and associated hardware and software. On typical IP routers using the FIB lookup algorithm Tree Bitmap, SMALTA shrinks FIB storage by at least 50%, representing roughly four years of routing table growth at current rates. SMALTA also reduces average lookup time by 25% for a uniform traffic matrix. Besides the benefits this brings to future routers, SMALTA provides a critical easy-to-deploy one-time benefit to the installed base should IPv4 address depletion result in increased routing table growth rate. The effective cost of this improvement is a sub-second delay in inserting updates into the FIB once every few hours. We describe SMALTA, prove its correctness, measure its performance using data from a Tier-1 provider as well as Route-Views. We also describe an implementation in Quagga that demonstrates its ease of implementation.