A longest prefix first search tree for IP lookup

The IP lookup mechanism is a key issue, in the design of IP routers. IP lookup is an important action in a router, which finds the next hop of each incoming packet with a longest-prefix-match address in the routing table. This work places the routing table on a longest prefix first search tree, which is constructed as a heap-like structure by the prefix length. A router using this scheme has fewer memory accesses when executing IP lookup than a router designed according to the Trie [E. Fredkin, Trie Memory, Communication of the ACM 3 (1960) 490–500], Patricia [K. Sklower, A tree-based routing table for Berkeley Unix, in: Proceedings of the USENIX Conference, 1991, pp. 93–99] or Prefix tree [M. Berger, IP lookup with low memory requirement and fast update, in: Proceedings of IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing, 2003, pp. 287–291]. Some nodes of the proposed tree can include two entries of the routing table to decrease the number of tree nodes. For instance, a routing table with 163,695 entries can be held in the proposed tree with 156,191 nodes. Furthermore, an improved scheme is presented to partition a tree into several smaller trees. The simulation reveals that the scheme not only lowers the tree height effectively but also scales well to IPv6 addresses.