Poptrie: A Compressed Trie with Population Count for Fast and Scalable Software IP Routing Table Lookup

Internet of Things leads to routing table explosion. An inexpensive approach for IP routing table lookup is required against ever growing size of the Internet. We contribute by a fast and scalable software routing lookup algorithm based on a multiway trie, called Poptrie. Named after our approach to traversing the tree, it leverages the population count instruction on bit-vector indices for the descendant nodes to compress the data structure within the CPU cache. Poptrie outperforms the state-of-the-art technologies, Tree BitMap, DXR and SAIL, in all of the evaluations using random and real destination queries on 35 routing tables, including the real global tier-1 ISP's full-route routing table. Poptrie peaks between 174 and over 240 Million lookups per second (Mlps) with a single core and tables with 500-800k routes, consistently 4-578% faster than all competing algorithms in all the tests we ran. We provide the comprehensive performance evaluation, remarkably with the CPU cycle analysis. This paper shows the suitability of Poptrie in the future Internet including IPv6, where a larger route table is expected with longer prefixes.