Scalable Parallel IP Address Lookup Architecture based on 2D-Torus network

Abstract

IP address lookup is a key issue in modern high performance router design. In order to improve the efficiency and scalability of IP address lookup, a novel Scalable Parallel IP Address Lookup Architecture (SPALA) based on 2D-Torus interconnection network is proposed. As an application of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) technology, IP address lookup, a complex task, can be completed by a great deal of simple Lookup Engine (LE) nodes, using a highly scalable interconnection network, 2D-Torus, as their communication fabric. The main design issues of SPALA architecture is presented in this paper, including the IP address lookup task partitioning policy, IP address lookup algorithm, and load-balanced routing algorithm for 2D-Torus network. Simulations of proposed architecture are conducted with a SystemC-based test bench. The results show that, with the scale of the size of the 2D-Torus network, the performance of IP address lookup can also scale well.