A study on IPv6 address lookup

Abstract

The traffic volumes in the Internet keep increasing, some researches point out that a core router needs to handle more than 150 million packets within a second. At the core router, the huge routing table exists. Therefore, a fast lookup algorithm is required. In the past, a fast lookup algorithm has been proposed. It is a hardware IP lookup searching engine and the major concept used is multi-level index tables with bit-shuffled trie. It was applied to IPv4. However, as the universality of the use of IPv6 is getting higher, the routers need to perform the lookup of the address up to 64 bits. In IPv6 address lookup, the longest prefix match still need to be performed in the routing table and the prefix length is varying up to 64 bits. This project is to introduce a new hardware architecture of the searching operation which is for IPv6 address lookup. The synthetic IPv6 routing table which contains about 215K prefixes is used. The prefix group lengths 32-47 and 48-64, which totally contain about 213K prefixes, are concentrated on. The multi-level index tables of the new hardware architecture are implemented.