Power-efficient TCAM partitioning for IP lookups with incremental updates

Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) provide a fast mechanism for IP lookups and a simple management for route updates. The high power consumption problem can be resolved by providing a TCAM partitioning technique that selectively addresses smaller portions of a TCAM. This paper proposes a 2-level TCAM architecture using prefix comparison rule to partition the routing table into a number of buckets of possibly equal sizes. The 2-level architecture results in a 2-step lookup process. The first step determines which bucket is used to search the input IP. The second step only searches the IP in the determined bucket from the first step. The prefix partitioning algorithm provides an incremental update. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has lower power consumption than the existing TCAM partitioning algorithms.