A fast and scalable IPv4 and 6 address lookup algorithm

摘要

Due to Internet's exponential growth in the last few years, we face two serious problems. First, the network becomes congested. Second, the number of IP addresses is not enough for distribution. For network congestion, we use fibers in the backbone of the networks to alleviate the bandwidth shortage problem. However, the networks are still congested at the routers. For the second problem, IPv6 expands the length of IP address from 32-bit in IPv4 to 128-bit. With such length, there will be no shortage of IP address. Therefore, the problem remained to be solved is a faster router. With 128-bit address, IP address lookup in the routing table will be an obvious problem. Slow IP address lookup will delay the packet forwarding in the router and degrade the network performance. In the paper, we will present a new and simple algorithm for accelerating the IP address lookup.