A fast update scheme for TCAM-based IPv6 routing lookup architecture

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet applications and the explosion of end users, IP address has been exhausted and routing lookup speed is the bottleneck of router design. In addition TCAM is widely used for implementation fast IP forwarding table lookup. However, the need to maintain a sorted list incremental updates may slow the lookup speed in a TCAM. In this paper, a fast TCAM update scheme is proposed for TCAM-Based IPv6 routing lookup architecture. Based on the characteristic of prefix distribution, we design a TCAM-Based router architecture for IPv6 routing lookup. As simulation result shows more than 90% update do not need any memory movement in updating operation. The worse case is (D-2)/2, where D is the length of chain.