The Bit-Map Trip Structure for Giga-Bit Forwarding Lookup in High-Speed Routers

Recently much research for developing forwarding table that support fast router without employing both special hardware and new protocols. This article introduces a new forwarding data structure based on the software to enable forwarding lookup to be penormed at giga-bit speed. The forwarding table is known as a bottleneck of the routers penormance due to its high complexity proportional to the forwarding table size. The recent research that based on the software uses a Patricia trie and its variants. and also uses a hash function with prefix length key and others. The proposed forwarding table structure construct a forwarding table by the bit stream array in which it constructs trie from routing table prefix entries and it represents each pointer pointing the child node and the associated forwarding table entry with one bit The trie structure and routing prefix pointer need a large memory when representing those by linked-list or array. but in the proposed data structure, the needed memory size is small enough since it represents information with one bit. Additionally, by use a lookup method that start searching at desired middle level we can shorten the search path. The introduced data structure. called bit-map trie shows that we can implement a fast forwarding engine on the conventional Pentium processor by reducing the backbone routing table fits into Level 2 cache of Pentium II processor and shortens the searching path. Our experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed method show that this bit-map trie accomplishes 5.7 million lookups per second.