On a trie partitioning algorithm for power-efficient TCAMs

Internet routers conduct routing table (RT) lookup based on the destination IP address of the incoming packet to decide which output port to forward the packet. Ternary content-addressible memories (TCAM) uses parallelism to achieve lookup in a single cycle. One of the major drawbacks of TCAM is its highpower consumption. Trie-based architecture has been proposed to reduce TCAM power consumption. The idea is to use an index TCAM to select one of many data TCAM blocks for lookup. However, power reduction is limited by the size of the index TCAM, which is always enabled for search. In this paper we develop a simple but effective trie-partitioning algorithm to reduce the index TCAM size, which achieves better reduction in power consumption, and at the same time guarantees full TCAM space utilization. We compared our algorithm (LogSplit) with PostOrderSplit (IEEE INFOCOM, 2003). For two real-world RTs (AADS and PAIX), the size of the index TCAM generated by LogSplit is 55–70% of that generated by PostOrderSplit; the largest power reduction factor of LogSplit is 41 for AADS and 68 for PAIX, while the largest power reduction factor of PostOrderSplit is 33 for AADS and 52 for PAIX. The improvement is even more significant in the worst case: the size of the index TCAM generated by LogSplit is 18–30% of that generated by PostOrderSplit for IPv4, and less than 1% of that generated by PostOrderSplit for IPv6; the largest power reduction factor of LogSplit is 173 for both IPv4 and IPv6, while the largest power reduction factor of PostOrderSplit is only 82 for IPv4 and 41 for IPv6. Copyright q 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.