Efficient Management of Access Control List by Combining Prefix Expansion and Range Matching Devices

TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) is a special type of memory used in routers in order to achieve high speed packet classification. Port numbers are one of the five typical fields in an ACL (Access Control List). Those that are expressed in ranges have been the reason for raising the cost of hardware due to the requirement of multiple entries. In this paper,we suggest a method to reduce the number of entries when expressing ranges in TCAM,using prefix expansion and hardware modification.