Scalable high-throughput SRAM-based architecture for IP-lookup using FPGA

Most high-speed Internet Protocol (IP) lookup implementations use tree traversal and pipelining. However, this approach results in inefficient memory utilization. Due to available on-chip memory and pin limitations of FPGAs, state-of-the-art designs on FPGAs cannot support large routing tables arising in backbone routers. Therefore, ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is widely used. We propose a novel SRAM-based linear pipeline architecture, named DuPI. Using a single Virtex-4, DuPI can support a routing table of up to 228 K prefixes, which is 3times the state-of-the-art. Our architecture can also be easily partitioned, so as to use external SRAM to handle even larger routing tables (up to 2 M prefixes), while maintaining a 324 MLPS throughput. The use of SRAM (instead of TCAM) leads to orders of magnitude of reduction in power dissipation. Employing caching to exploit Internet traffic locality, we can achieve a throughput of 1.3 GLPS (billion lookups per second). Our design also maintains packet input order, and supports in-place non-blocking route updates.