An SRAM-based novel hardware architecture for longest prefix matching for IP route lookup

A static random access memory (SRAM)-based novel hardware architecture for longest prefix match (LPM) search scheme has been proposed in this paper. The key concept of this architecture is to store the IP prefixes virtually in the forwarding table. This architecture reduces memory consumption by using a two-tier hierarchical SRAM-based memory structure for maintaining the next hop port information. Originally, next hop addresses are kept in the shared global memory called next hop global memory (NHGM) and its links are maintained in another memory, called next hop link memory (NHLM). This approximately reduces memory consumption by 50–62.5% compared to existing SRAM-based schemes. The proposed architecture consumes single memory write cycle to store an IP prefix and also takes single memory read cycle for LPM search. However, finding next hop information incurs two memory read cycles due to hierarchical next hop memory structure. The proposed scheme performs an LPM lookup operation in 1.05–1.31 ns in IPv4 and between 1.05 and 1.6 ns in IPv6. This results into LPM search throughput of 950 million lookups per second (MLPS) to 760 MLPS in IPv4 and between 620 and 950 MLPS in IPv6. The average search throughput achievable from this architecture is roughly 850 MLPS in IPv4 and 780 MLPS in IPv6. The numerical results show that this architecture significantly reduces memory requirement, power consumption, and transistor-count/bit requirement.