Packet Classification Using Two-Dimensional Binary Search on Length

The rapid growth of the Internet has stimulated the development of various new applications and services, and the service providers and the Internet users now require different levels of service qualities rather than current best-effort service which treats all incoming packet equally. Therefore, next generation routers should provide the various levels of services. In order to provide the quality of services, incoming packets should be classified into flows according to pre-defined rules, and this should be performed for all incoming packets in wire-speed. Packet classification not only involves multi-dimensional search but also finds the highest priority rule among all matching rules. Area-based quad-trie is a very good algorithm that constructs a two-dimensional trie using source and destination prefix fields. However, it performs the linear search for the prefix length, and hence it does not show very good search performance. In this paper, we propose to apply binary search on length to the area-based quad-trie algorithm. In improving the search performance, we also propose two new algorithms considering the priority of rules in building the trie.