Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan 333, Taiwan. E-mail: cllee@mail.cgu.edu.tw | Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402, Taiwan. E-mail: pcwang@cs.nchu.edu.tw | Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402, Taiwan. E-mail: pcwang@cs.nchu.edu.tw
Note: [] Corresponding author.
Abstract: Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) has been widely used to perform fast packet classification due to its ability of solving the problem in O(1) time without considering the number of entries, mask continuity and their lengths. However, it also comes with several shortcomings, such as the limited number of entries, expensive cost and power consumption. We propose an efficient algorithm to reduce the required TCAM bits by encoding the IP address portion of the policies. With the proposed scheme, the achieved compression ratio can be as small as 9% for IPv6 policies. Moreover, the TCAM throughput is improved by a factor of 175% with pipelining design. Obviously, the proposed scheme is attractive for the forthcoming IPv6.
