A Hybrid Prefix Cashing Scheme for Efficient IP Address Lookup

We propose a hybrid prefix caching scheme to enable high speed IP address lookup. All prefixes loaded in a prefix cache should not be overlapped in address range for correct IP lookup. So, every non-leaf prefix needs to be expanded not so as to be overlapped. The shorter expanded prefix is more preferable because it can cover wider address range just as an single entry in a prefix cache. We exploits advantages of two dynamic prefix expansion techniques, bounded prefix expansion technique and bitmap-based prefix expansion technique. The proposed scheme uses dual bound values whereas just one bound value is used in bounded prefix expansion. Our elaborated technique make the dual bound values be associated with several subtries flexibly using bitmap information, rather than with fixed subtries. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the average length of the expanded prefixes and cache miss ratio. The experiment results show the proposed scheme has lower cache miss ratio than other previous schemes including both bounded prefix expansion and bitmap-based expansion irrespective of the cache size.