Hybrid Key Duplication Hashing Techniques for IP Address Lookup

In the past decade there has been an increasing need for designs to address the time and cost efficiency issues from various computer network applications such as general IP address lookup and specific network intrusion detection. Hashing techniques have been widely adopted for this purpose, among which XOR-operation-based hashing is one of most popular techniques due to its relatively small hash process delay. In most current commonly used XOR-hashing algorithms, each of the hash key bits is usually explicitly XORed only at most once in the hash process, which may limit the amount of potential randomness that can be introduced by the hashing process. In [1] a series of bit duplication techniques are proposed by systematically duplicating one row of key bits. This paper further looks into various ways in duplicating and re-using key bits to maximize randomness needed in the hashing process so as to enhance the overall performance further. Our simulation results show that, even with a slight increase in hardware requirement, a very significant reduction in the amount of hash collision can be obtained by the proposed technique.