Abstract
As the key building block for enabling network virtualization, virtual routers have attracted much attention recently. In a virtual router platform, multiple virtual router instances coexist, each with its own FIB (Forwarding Information Base). The small amount of high-speed memory in a physical router platform severely limits the number of FIBs supported, which leads to a scalability challenge. In this paper, we present a method towards TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) based scalable virtual routers, through a merged data structure that enables the sharing of prefixes from several FIBs in TCAMs. Based on this data structure, we propose two approaches to merge multiple FIBs in TCAMs, paving the way for scalable virtual routers. Experimental results show that, by using the two approaches for storing 14 full IPv4 FIBs, the TCAM memory requirement can be reduced by about 92% and 82% respectively, compared with the conventional approach of treating FIBs as independent entities.
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