High–performance routing–table lookup

Abstract

The dramatic performance increase observed in the Internet over the last couple of years requires considerably enhanced router technology in order to provide the view of an e¯cient global network to applications and users. Improvements are needed with respect to data rate but also considering router functionality, for example, to support Quality of Service for multimedia applications. This paper gives a brief overview of some aspects related to router design in general and to route lookup in more detail. Several actual approaches to increase route lookup performance are introduced.

Protocol wrappers for layered network packet processing in reconfigurable hardware

“…Similar circuits implement IP over Ethernet 9 data in static systems. Instead of offloading protocol processing to a coprocessor, 10,11 FPX components let hardware implement all packet-processing functions.…”

On the design of IP routers Part 1: Router architectures

“…Hardware route lookup and forwarding is also under active investigation in both research and commercial designs [30,31]. The argument for a software-based implementation stresses¯exibility.…”