Efficient partition based IPv6 lookup algorithm for packet forwarding

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet and increasing address needs, IPv4 addresses are fast depleting. A new Internet addressing protocol, IPv6 with wide range of addresses has been proposed to replace the existing IPv4. Hence, the backbone routers need to maintain larger IPv6-based lookup tables with relevant forwarding information to the next hops. Since the destination address fields of the IPv6 packet is 128 bits each, this means that the lookup table may need to maintain up to 2(128) entries. Normal linear lookup method is not suitable, in terms of time and memory consumption, for the lookup operation. In this paper we have proposed an efficient partition based scheme compared to existing method of Chang and Lim with software implementation [4].