The Internet is growing very rapidly in both size and traffic. This gowth has placed excessive strain on the Internet infrastructure especially routers. The IP address lookup is the operation that search in order to determine the next hop of the packet. This operation is complex and is a major bottleneck in high speed routers.
This paper proposes an efficient IP address lookup scheme in hardware for high speed routers. The proposed scheme optimizes the size of forwarding tables and the number of memory access. We also present a inexpensive and simple hardware design which can be implemented in pipeline. We compared the scheme with other lookup schemes by simulation. As a result, with current 10ns SRAM, our scheme lookups 100 million packets per second, which is much faster than any commercially available lookup scheme
