Robust routing table design for IPv6 lookup

The most pressing issue in IP lookup has been to solve the longest prefix match (LPM) problem. The solution must appeal to 3 major criteria of lookup and update performance of the routing table, and memory consumption. However, in IPv6 route table lookup addressing the problem of the possible long prefix (128-bit) in the worst case is crucial. In this paper, this challenge is met by ´breaking´ the address length into ´smaller´ pieces of different prefix length in separate but contiguous tables. Coupled with smart prefix sorting and hardware hashing, this scheme is designed to be flexible and memory efficient.