Rapid Evolution of Time-Efficient Packet Classifiers

Communication networks today are facing an ever increasing network traffic as well as raising quality-of-service agreements, which together demand for high performance network routers. Since a router has to search a large set or routing rules for every incoming packet, it normally utilizes efficient search mechanisms, such as trees or hash tables. This paper evolves hash functions directly in hardware and also discusses an improved initialization process. On a benchmark test consisting of 65,536 routing rules, the final hash functions consume an average of about 1.3 memory accesses for rule searching for every incoming data packet.