A RAM-Based MAC Table with Two-Tier Security at Layer 2

A novel architecture has been presented in this paper which replaces the conventional content addressable memory (CAM)-based media access control (MAC) table by a RAM-based MAC table. The proposed RAM-based MAC table stores only the port numbers instead of both MAC addresses and their associated port numbers. The architecture also prevents unauthorized access to data in a network by disallowing broadcasting of an incoming frame and instead it broadcasts a control signal to every other host except the sender in the network requesting a response from the intended recipient. In this architecture, a two-tier security at data-link layer has also been established by introducing two additional fields of security keys (primary and secondary) to tighten the security. The proposed architecture has been compared with the existing and improved CAM-based approaches and shows 50% lesser number of transistor count usage. This leads to less heat dissipation and power consumption.