Network Processors
Cache Scrubbing in Microprocessors: Myth or Necessity?
PRDC '04 Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC'04)
Soft Errors in Advanced Computer Systems
IEEE Design & Test
Algorithms for advanced packet classification with ternary CAMs
Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
A family of cells to reduce the soft-error-rate in ternary-CAM
Proceedings of the 43rd annual Design Automation Conference
High Performance Switches and Routers
High Performance Switches and Routers
The N-Version Approach to Fault-Tolerant Software
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Error-Correcting Codes for Ternary Content Addressable Memories
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Topological transformation approaches to optimizing TCAM-based packet classification systems
Proceedings of the eleventh international joint conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Minimizing soft errors in TCAM devices: a probabilistic approach to determining scrubbing intervals
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I: Regular Papers
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Ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) are widely used in network devices carrying out the core operation of single-operation lookups. TCAMs are the core component of many networking devices such as routers, switches, firewalls and intrusion detection/prevention systems. Unfortunately, they are susceptible to errors caused by environmental factors such as radiation. TCAM errors may have significant impact on search results. In fact, only one error in a TCAM can cause 100 % of search keys to have wrong lookup results. Therefore, TCAM error detection and correction schemes are needed to enhance the reliability of TCAM-based systems. All prior solutions require hardware changes to TCAM circuitry and therefore are difficult to deploy. In this paper, we propose TCAMChecker, the first software-based solution for TCAM error detection and correction. Given a search key, TCAMChecker probabilistically decides to verify the lookup result. If TCAMChecker decides to verify the lookup result then it performs two parallel lookups for the given search key. If the lookup results do not match then at least one error is detected and is corrected by using a backup error-free memory. Note that the probability of lookup verification can be tuned for tradeoff between performance and reliability. A higher probability of lookup verification provides a more reliable TCAM system at the cost of performance. Our proposed TCAMChecker can be easily deployed on existing TCAM-based networking devices to improve the system reliability.