MLET: A Power Efficient Approach for TCAM Based, IP Lookup Engines in Internet Routers

Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks specially the Internet. Forwarding IP packets is a valuable and vital function in Internet routers. Routers extract destination IP address from packets and lookup those addresses in their own routing table. This task is called IP lookup. Internet address lookup is a challenging problem due to the increasing routing table sizes. Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular for designing high-throughput address lookup engines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite the TCAMs speed, their high power consumption is their major drawback. In this paper, Multilevel Enabling Technique (MLET), a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has been proposed. This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithm to achieve lower power consumption. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table’s power consumption.