IP packet forwarding based on comb extraction scheme

In this paper, we present an efficient IP packet forwarding technique and its architecture. One forwarding table is decomposed into two balanced smaller sub-forwarding tables by a novel splitting rule. Therefore, an IP lookup can be converted into a pair of small sub-lookups. The output of an incoming packet can be determined by comparing the information, attached to the matching sub-prefixes of both sub-lookups. The sub-lookups and information comparison can perform in parallel. Our approach not only speeds up the Best Matching Prefix (BMP) search, but also reduces storage space at the same time.