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Publication Details for Article "Scalable High-Speed Prefix Matching"

 

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Authors: Marcel Waldvogel, G Varghese, J Turner, Bernhard Plattner
Group: Communication Systems
Type: Article
Title: Scalable High-Speed Prefix Matching
Year: 2001
Month: November
Pub-Key: WFTP01
Journal: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Volume: 19
Number: 4
Keywords: IP forwarding, scalability, router, prefix-matching
Abstract: Finding the longest matching prefix from a database of keywords is an old problem with a number of applications, ranging from dictionary searches to advanced memory management to computational geometry. But perhaps todays most frequent best matching prefix lookups occur in the Internet, when forwarding packets from router to router. Internet traffic volume and link speeds are rapidly increasing; at the same time, an increasing user population is increasing the size of routing tables against which packets must be matched. Both factors make router prefix matching extremely performance critical. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy for prefix matching technologies, which we use as a basis for describ-ing, categorizing, and comparing existing approaches. We then present in detail a fast scheme using binary search over hash tables, which is especially suited for matching long addresses, such as the 128 bit addresses proposed for use in the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6. We also present optimizations that exploit the structure of existing databases to further improve access time and reduce storage space.
Resources: [BibTeX]

 

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