PR-Trie: A Hybrid Trie with Ant Colony Optimization Based Prefix Partitioning for Memory-Efficient IPv4/IPv6 Route Lookup

Abstract

Memory-efficient Internet Protocol (IP) lookup with high speed is essential to achieve link-speed packet forwarding in IP routers. The rapid growth of Internet traffic and the development of optical link technologies have made IP lookup a major performance bottleneck in core routers. In this paper, we propose a new IP route lookup architecture based on hardware called Prefix-Route Trie (PR-Trie), which supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. In PR-Trie, we develop a novel structure called Overlapping Hybrid Trie (OHT) to perform fast longest-prefix-matching (LPM) based on Multibit-Trie (MT), and a hash-based level matching query used to achieve only one off-chip memory access per lookup. In addition, the proposed PR-Trie also supports fast incremental updates. Since the memory complexity in MT-based IP lookup schemes depends on the level-partitioning solution and the data structure used, we develop an optimization algorithm called Bitmap-based Prefix Partitioning Optimization (BP2O). The proposed BP2O is based on a heuristic search using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms to optimize memory efficiency. Experimental results using real-life routing tables prove that our proposal has superior memory efficiency. Theoretical performance analyses show that PR-Trie outperforms the classical Trie-based IP lookup algorithms.