MEET-IP: Memory and Energy Efficient TCAM-Based IP Lookup
Wenjun Li, Xianfeng Li, Hui Li · 2017
Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is becoming very popular for designing high-throughput forwarding engines on most of today's high-end routers. Despite its capability for line-speed queries, it is very power hungry and capacity inefficient. Many recent research efforts, such as CoolCAMs and SmartPC, were proposed to reduce power consumption by constructing a pre-classifier to activate TCAM blocks selectively. However, these efforts achieve power savings at the expense of poor utilization of TCAM capacity, and the potential of power reduction is not fully exploited in many cases. In this paper, we propose MEET-IP, a memory and energy efficient two-stage scheme for TCAM based IP routing table lookup. Based on a top-down optimization of partitioning algorithm, routing tables can be evenly split into TCAM blocks without memory holes or a large amount of index TCAM. Experimental results based on real routing tables show that our design achieves more than 98% power reduction with a TCAM storage overhead of less than 3% on average.