Power efficient packet classification using cascaded bloom filter and off-the-shelf ternary CAM for WDM networks

Abstract

In wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks, tens or hundreds of wavelengths can be transmitted over a single fiber. As transmission line speed goes to 10 Gb/s and beyond, ternary CAM (TCAM) is usually employed for wire speed packet classification. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that addresses the impact of WDM transmission on the power consumption of packet classification. We show that as the number of wavelengths increases in the WDM networks, the power consumption of TCAMs can become the limiting factor for WDM network expansion. For example, the power consumption of IPv4 and IPv6 packet classification with merely 32 channels at 40 Gb/s can be as high as 700 and 1400 W, respectively, while technology wise it is feasible to transmit over 500 channels over a single fiber. Existing power efficient TCAM designs require special modification to TCAM cell structures, which makes the adoption of the technology difficult. This paper proposes a novel approach which cascades bloom filter with off-the-shelf TCAM to greatly reduce the power consumption of packet classification. In particular, the proposed solution takes advantage of the fact that bloom filters may give false positive alarms but never give false negative alarms. By eliminating majority of non-matching packets before passing the packets to the TCAM, the TCAM is only activated to exam packets with a high potential of matching in the filter set. The proposed scheme greatly reduces the activation frequency of the TCAM, thus achieving great power savings.