High-speed IP address lookup using balanced multi-way trees

Rapid growth of the Internet traffic requires more bandwidth and high-speed packet processing in the Internet routers. As one of the major packet processing performed in routers, address lookup determines an output port using the destination IP address of incoming packets. Since routers should perform address lookups in real-time for hundred millions of incoming packets per second referring a huge routing table, address lookup is one of the most challenging operations. In this paper, we propose a multi-way search architecture for IP address lookup which shows very good performance in search speed. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme requires a single 282 kbyte SRAM to store about 40,000 routing entries, and an address lookup is achieved by 5.9 memory accesses in average.