Adaptive One Memory Access Bloom Filters

Abstract

Bloom filters are widely used to perform fast approximate membership checking in networking applications. The main limitation of Bloom filters is that they suffer from false positives that can only be reduced by using more memory. We suggest to take advantage of a common repetition in the identity of queried elements to adapt Bloom filters for avoiding false positives for elements that repeat upon queries. In this paper, one memory access Bloom filters are used to design an adaptation scheme that can effectively remove false positives while completing all queries in a single memory access. The proposed filters are well suited for scenarios on which the number of memory bits per element is low and thus complement existing adaptive cuckoo filters that are not efficient in that case. The evaluation results using packet traces show that the proposed adaptive Bloom filters can significantly reduce the false positive rate in networking applications with the single memory access. In particular, when using as few as four bits per element, false positive rates below 5% are achieved.