• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.8B
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• pp.541-548
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• 2005

IP lookup and forwarding process becomes the bottleneck of packet transmission as IP traffic increases. Previous hardware-based IP address lookup schemes using an index-based table are not memory-efficient due to sparse distribution of the routing prefixes. In this paper, we propose memory-efficient hardware based IP lookup scheme called set-associative IP address lookup scheme, which provides the same IP lookup speed with much smaller memory requirement. In the proposed scheme, an NHA entry stores the prefix and next hop together. The IP lookup procedure compares a destination IP address with eight entries in a corresponding set simultaneously and finds the longest matched prefix. The memory requirement of the proposed scheme is about $42\%$ of that of Lin's scheme. Thus, the set-associative IP address lookup scheme is a memory-efficient hardware based IP address lookup scheme.