Pipelined Implementation of TCAM-Based Search Engines in High-Performance IP Routers

Search engine is a critical component in several stages of a pipeline flow in high-performance IP routers. To achieve high performance, it has been proposed to use TCAMs to implement search engines in hardware. In this paper, the state- of-art TCAM-based MSMB-LPT scheme is used as an example to show how to introduce pipelining into TCAM-based search by presenting pipelined scheme P-MSMB-LPT. It is shown that P-MSMB-LPT eliminates the unnecessary hazard that exists in the MSMB-LPT scheme, and achieves near-optimal speedup with almost no additional hardware overhead.