MLET: A POWER EFFICIENT APPROACH FOR TCAM BASED, IP LOOKUP ENGINES IN INTERNET ROUTERS
Hamid Mahini, Reza Berangi, Alireza Mahini · International journal of Computer Networks & Communications · 2010
Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks specially the Internet.Forwarding IP packets is a valuable and vital function in Internet routers.Routers extract destination IP address from packets and lookup those addresses in their own routing table.This task is called IP lookup.Internet address lookup is a challenging problem due to the increasing routing table sizes.Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular for designing high-throughput address lookup engines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage.Despite the TCAMs speed, their high power consumption is their major drawback.In this paper, Multilevel Enabling Technique (MLET), a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has been proposed.This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithm to achieve lower power consumption.The performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table's power consumption.