Binary Search on Tree Levels for IP Address Lookup

Address lookup is an essential function in the Internet routers, and it determines overall router performance. In this paper, we have thoroughly investigated the binary-search-based address lookup algorithms and proposed a new algorithm based on binary search on prefix lengths. Most of the existing binary search schemes perform binary search on prefix values, and hence the lookup speed is proportional to the length of prefixes or the log function of the number of prefixes. The previous algorithm based on binary search on prefix lengths has superior lookup performance than others. However, the algorithm requires very complicated pre-computation of markers and best matching prefixes in internal nodes since naive binary search is not possible in their scheme. This complicated pre-computation makes the composition of the routing table and incremental update very difficult. By using leaf-pushing, the proposed algorithm in this paper removes the complicated pre-computation of the Previous work in performing the binary search on prefix lengths. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme has very good performance in lookup speed compared with previous works.