Power-Aware TCAMs for Routing Table Lookup

Ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) give a simple and fast solution to IP lookups. However, the high power consumption in TCAMs limits the router design to fewer ports. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to partition prefixes in the routing table exactly and a power-aware architecture with two level TCAMs, index_TCAM and sub_TCAM. For the bursty access pattern, we propose a load-balancing algorithm to distribute the lookup traffic between buckets of sub_TCAM. For real routing tables and the given number (K) of buckets in sub_TCAM, the power consumption of our architecture is 9 percent +91% *(1/K) that of native TCAM.