A New TCAM Architecture for Managing ACL in Routers

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is a special type of memory used in routers to achieve high speed packet forwarding and classification Packet forwarding is done by referring to the rules written in the routing table whereas packet classification is performed by referring to the rules in the Access Control List (ACL) TCAM uses more transistors than Random Access Memory (RAM) resulting in high power consumption and high production cost Therefore it is necessary to re duce the entries written in the TCAM to reduce the transistor count In this paper we propose a new TCAM architecture by using Range Matching Devices (RMD) integrated within the TCAM s control logic with an optimized prefix expansion algorithm The proposed method reduces the number of entries required to express ACL rules especially when specifying port ranges With less than 10 RMDs the total number of lines required to write port ranges in the TCAM can be reduced to approximately 50%