Bitmap-based Prefix Caching for Fast IP Lookup

Abstract

IP address lookup is very crucial in performance of routers. Several works have been done on prefix caching to enhance the performance of IP address lookup. Since a prefix represents a range of IP addresses, a prefix cache shows better performance than an IP address cache. However, not every prefix is cacheable in itself. In a prefix cache it causes false hit to cache a non-leaf prefix because there is possibly the longer matching prefix in the routing table. Prefix expansion techniques such as complete prefix tree expansion (CPTE) make it possible to cache the non-leaf prefixes as the expanded forms, but it is hard to manage the expanded prefixes. The expanded prefixes sometimes incur a great deal of update overhead in a routing table. We propose a bitmap-based prefix cache (BMCache) to provide low update overhead as well as low cache miss ratio. The proposed scheme does not have any expanded prefixes in the routing table, but it can expand a non-leaf prefix using a bitmap on caching time. The trace-driven simulation shows that BMCache has very low miss ratio in spite of its low update overhead compared to other schemes.