High speed IP routing lookup algorithm based on RAM and TCAM

With the increasing of speed, network traffic and routing scale of the Internet, IP routing lookup has become one of the main reasons why performance of core routers in the Internet becomes the bottleneck. In this paper, with the analysis of two routing lookup algorithms based on hardware architecture, we take advantage of their virtues and propose an routing lookup algorithm based on RAM and TCAM. The algorithm overcomes deficiency of the two algorithms, and has the characteristics of fast search, fast update, small memory space and easy implementation, and can be applicable to the high speed environments of core router.