A Multizone Pipelined Cache for IP Routing

Caching recently referenced IP addresses and their forwarding information is an effective strategy to increase routing lookup speed. This paper proposes a multizone non-blocking pipelined cache for IP routing lookup that achieves lower miss rates compared to previously reported IP caches. The twostage pipeline design provides a half-prefix half-full address cache and reduces the cache power consumption. By adopting a very small non-blocking buffer, the cache reduces the effective miss penalty. This cache design takes advantage of storing prefixes but requires smaller table expansions (up to 50% less) compared with prefix caches. Simulation results on real traffic display lower cache miss rate and up to 30% reduction in power consumption.