Study on Efficient Cache Structures Providing Policy–Based Services in IP Routers

In the Internet shared by the various applications, it is necessary to realize the policy–service based on the traffic characteristics. For this purpose, the router is required to forward the packets according to the requirements of the traffic flow that the packet belongs to. However, the packet (and flow) classification could easily become a bottleneck in the high–speed router because the router is required to search multiple fields within the packet. In this paper, we propose a new packet classification algorithm capable of following the packet forwarding rate of the high–speed routers with the commercially available CPU, RAM, and cache memories. Through our experiments, we show the effects of parameters of the cache memory on the processing rate of packet classification. key words IP router, cache memory, policy service, flow statistics, CPU cycles