An ultra-fast universal incremental update algorithm for trie-based routing lookup

With the rapid growth of the Internet, the update messages in backbone routers become more and more frequent due to the ever-increasing dynamic changes on network topologies and new emerging functionalities of the Internet. In addition, update messages often come as a burst. Update action interrupts the packet lookup operation in the router´s data plane, thus inefficient incremental update algorithm slows down IP lookup speed, and potentially badly degrades the system performance during bursty updates. Among trie-based routing lookup algorithms, binary trie has the best update complexity O(W) (W is the maximum depth of the trie), but exhibits slow lookup speed, failing to be competent for forwarding tens of gigabit-per-second traffic in backbone routers. Therefore, various improved routing lookup algorithms are proposed to pursue high speed based on binary trie, but sacrificing the performance of incremental update. To minimize the interruption time that update operation incurs, we propose Blind Spot (BS) algorithm by picking out those updating nodes which would have produced domino effect, achieving an update complexity of O(lookup+h), meanwhile keeping the lookup speed almost unchanged. Blind Spot algorithm is a universal methodology, which is applicable to all the trie-based lookup algorithms. To evaluate the performance of BS algorithm, we applied it to Lulea [1] and LC-trie [2] algorithms as two representatives. Extensive experimental results show that both Lulea+BS and LC+BS algorithms achieve a much faster update speed than binary trie, while keeping the same lookup speed as the original Lulea and LC-trie algorithms.