MLET: A Power Efficient Approach for TCAM Based, IP Lookup Engines in Internet Routers

摘要

Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks specially theInternet. Forwarding IP packets is a valuable and vital function in Internetrouters. Routers extract destination IP address from packets and lookup thoseaddresses in their own routing table. This task is called IP lookup. Internetaddress lookup is a challenging problem due to the increasing routing tablesizes. Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popularfor designing high-throughput address lookup-engines on routers: they are fast,cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite the TCAMs speed, their high powerconsumption is their major drawback. In this paper, Multilevel EnablingTechnique (MLET), a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has beenproposed. This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithmto achieve lower power consumption. The performance evaluation of the proposedapproach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table's powerconsumption.