Two-level tries: A general acceleration structure for parallel routing table accesses

Abstract

The stringent performance requirement for the high efficiency of routing protocols on the Internet can be satisfied by exploiting the threaded border gateway protocol (TBGP) on multi- cores, but the state-of-the-art TBGP performance is restricted by a mass of contentions when racing to access the routing table. To this end, the highly-efficient parallel access approach appears to be a promising solution to achieve ultra-high route processing speed. This study proposes a general routing table structure consisting of two-level tries for fast parallel access, and it presents a heuristic-based divide-and-recombine algorithm to solve a mass of contentions, thereby accelerating the parallel route updates of multi-threading and boosting the TBGP performance. As a projected TBGP, this study also modifies the table operations such as insert and lookup, and validates their correctness according to the behaviors of the traditional routing table. Our evaluations on a dual quad-core Xeon server show that the parallel access contentions decrease sharply by 92.5% versus the traditional routing table, and the maximal update time of a thread is reduced by 56.8% on average with little overhead. The convergence time of update messages are improved by 49.7%.