A High Performance Router Based on Network Processor and Ternary—CAM

摘要

Network processors are designed to for-ward IP packets at wire-speed, with the advantage (over ASIC-based solutions) of being programmable. TCAM(ternary content-addressable memory) is a perfect hard-ware realization for fully parallel search. The ternary ca-pability can be used to determine longest prefix matches.This paper addresses how to use IXP (Internet eXchange processor), a kind of network processor, and TCAM to design a high performance router. We also present a ta-ble management algorithm to decrease the incremental up-date time of TCAM and improve its utilization. Then we analyse the performance of our prototype and demonstrate that it can easily sustain wire-speed for eight 100Mbps and two 1000Mbps Ethernet ports.