A New Efficient Binary Search on Range for IP Address Lookup

IP address lookup is an important function to meet such requirements as high speed, memory size and low power for the overall performance of the routers. The biggest problem of IP address lookup is that prefixes has a variable length so that longest prefix match should be employed for IP address lookup. Binary search is useful to decrease search times. But binary search is only adaptable to an exact match. Prefix range search proposed the method binary search can be extended for the longest prefix match. However, this approach requires a lot of memories for the increased set of prefixes and pointers. We focus on boundaries between prefixes which can be removed and the number of pointers. This paper proposes the improved algorithm to reduce the memory requirement in prefix range search dramatically.