In next-generation networks, packet classification is important in fulfilling the requirements of multimedia services, including VoIP and VoD. Using pre-defined filters, the incoming packets can be categorized that determines to which forwarding class a packet belongs. Packet classification is essentially a problem of multidimensional range matching. The tuple space search is a well-known solution based on multiple hash accesses for various filter length combinations. The tuple-based algorithm, a rectangle search, is highly scalable with respect to the number of filters; however, it suffers from the memory-explosion problem. Besides, the lookup performance of the rectangle search is not sufficiently fast to accomplish high-speed packet classification. This work proposes an improved scheme to reduce the required storage and realize OC-192 wire-speed forwarding. The scheme consists of two parts. The "Tuple Reduction Algorithm" drastically reduces the number of tuples by duplicating filters. Dynamic programming is used to optimize the tuple reduction and two heuristic approaches are introduced to simplify the optimization process. Furthermore, the "Look-ahead Caching" scheme is presented to improve the lookup performance. The basic idea is to prevent unnecessary tuple probing by filtering out the "un-matched" situation of the incoming packet. The experimental results show that combining the tuple reduction algorithm with look-ahead caching increases the lookup speed by a factor of six while requiring only around one third of the storage. Additionally, an extension of multiple fields to more general filters is addressed.

Nowadays, the commonly used table lookup scheme for IP routing is based on the so-called classless interdomain routing (CIDR). With CIDR, routers must find out the best matching prefix (BMP) for IP packet forwarding, which complicates the IP lookup. Since the IP lookup performance is a major design issue for the new generation routers, we investigate the properties of the routing table and present a new IP lookup scheme. By adopting the extreme compression, the size of the forwarding table can be compressed to 360 Kbytes for a large routing table with 58,000 routing entries. It can accomplish one IPv4 route lookup within maximum nine memory accesses. Consequently, the data structure for the incremental update is introduced. With the new data structure, the proposed scheme can accomplish one route update within 500 ns. Even under the circumstance with 4000 route updates per second, the performance degradation is as low as 0.2 %.