IP-address lookup using LC-tries

There has recently been a notable interest in the organization of routing information to enable fast lookup of IP addresses. The interest is primarily motivated by the goal of building multi-Gb/s routers for the Internet, without having to rely on multi-layer switching techniques. We address this problem by using an LC-trie, a trie structure with combined path and level compression. This data structure enables us to build efficient, compact and easily searchable implementations of an IP routing table. The structure can store both unicast and multicast addresses with the same average search times. The search depth increases as Θ(log logn) with the number of entries in the table for a large class of distributions and it is independent of the length of the addresses. A node in the trie can be coded with four bytes. Only the size of the base vector, which contains the search strings, grows linearly with the length of the addresses when extended from 4 to 16 bytes, as mandated by the shift from IP version 4 to version 6. We present the basic structure, as well as an adaptive version that roughly doubles the number of lookups per second. More general classifications of packets that are needed for link sharing, quality of service provisioning and for multicast and multipath routing are also discussed. Our experimental results compare favorably with those reported previously in the research literature. Keywords— IP address lookup, LC-trie, search, routing.