Efficient Mapping of Range Classifier into Ternary-CAM

  • Authors:
  • Huan Liu

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • HOTI '02 Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on High Performance Interconnects HOT Interconnects
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Packet classification is inherently a multi dimensional search problem which is either very computation intensive or memory intensive for software implementation. Thus, hardware based solution is necessary to keep up with gigabit line rate processing. In this paper, we consider using standard Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) as a hardware classification engine. Traditionally, this approach has been deemed inefficient because ranges have tobe broken into prefixes before stored in TCAM, resulting in large expansion. We propose a novel scheme where we can efficiently map ranges into TCAM. Our proposal has no expansion at all, or very little expansion for width constrained application. Our proposal enables high speed deterministic classification using low cost commodity hardware.