Coolcams: power-efficient TCAMs for forwarding engines

Ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular for designing high-throughput forwarding engines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage. However, a major drawback of TCAMs is their high power consumption. This paper presents architectures and algorithms for making TCAM-based routing tables more power efficient. The proposed architectures and algorithms are simple to implement, use commodity TCAMs, and provide worst-case power consumption guarantees (independent of routing table contents).