It is becoming apparent that the next generation IP route lookup architecture needs to achieve speeds of 100Gbps and beyond while supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 with fast real-time updates to accommodate ever-growing routing tables. Some of the proposed multibit-trie based schemes, such as Tree Bitmap [1], have been used in today's high-end routers. However, their large data structure often requires multiple external memory accesses for each route lookup. A pipelining technique is widely used to achieve high-speed lookup with a cost of using many external memory chips. Pipelining also often leads to poor memory load-balancing. In this paper, we propose a new IP route lookup architecture called FlashTrie that overcomes the shortcomings of the multibit-trie based approach. We use a hash-based membership query to limit off-chip memory accesses per lookup to one and to balance memory utilization among the memory modules. We also develop a new data structure called Prefix-Compressed Tri...
Masanori Bando, H. Jonathan Chao