EASTFILE: AN ENERGY AWARE, SCALABLE, AND TCAM BASED FAST IP LOOKUP ENGINE

Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks especially in the Internet. Forwarding IP packets is a valuable and vital function in the Internet routers. Routers extract destination IP address from packets and lookup those addresses in their own routing table. This task is called IP lookup. Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular for designing highthroughput address Lookup engines on routers: they are fast, cost effective and simple to manage. Despite their premise on high-throughput, large TCAM arrays are prohibitive due to their excessive power consumption and lack of scalable design schemes. Therefore high power consumption in TCAMs is the mainspring of their failure in scalable IP lookup engines. This paper presents a novel and intelligent energy aware TCAM-Based IP lookup engine (EASTFILE) which is scalable for large IP lookup tables and also IPv6 lookup. Energy aware means that power consumption in this scheme is bounded. Actually this method decreases power consumption nearly 74% rather than the referenced architecture in the worst case. Also this method decreases 46% number of match lines in the first step of lookup operation rather than the other multi level enabling techniques or simple partitioning technique. This fact provides using TCAMs in large IP lookup tables and IPv6 addresses. In addition, the main operations of an IP lookup engine such as lookup, insert, withdrawal and update are very efficient in the proposed approach.

High Performance Routers, IP Lookup, Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM), Low-Power Design