Line Speed IP Lookup in Software Using Improved Functional Units

Due to fast increase in line speeds and number of networks, backbone routers need fast and scalable IP lookup schemes. Hardware solutions are fast but, generally, less scalable than software-based solutions. In this paper, we present generic hardware units to accelerate the IP lookup in software. Experimental results show that using DMPTree data structure for IP lookup, more than 30% improvement can be obtained by adding simple instructions to the running processor without any special customization. Our hardware units embedded in software-driven environment (i.e a generic processor) can accelerate other packet processing operations such as parsing, quality of service (QoS), filtering and classification.

Keywords:

DMP-Tree , Hardware Acceleration , IP Lookup , Packet Parsing , Packet Processing