A multi-thread based approach for IP address lookup

Without any doubt, IP Address lookup is an important function of routers. As size of routing tables getting larger and links getting faster, the need of a fast and efficient method to Lookup prefix addresses get more sensed. Although there was a period that hardware based approaches almost faded the software ones; but recently by introducing the multicore processors which gives the possibility of running multiple threads simultaneously, new windows are opened to software based approaches. In this paper we would improve the efficiency of routing and forwarding the packets, using multicore processing property of today´s processors. This aim can be reached by searching and accessing prefixes in a parallel way, using a specific data structure. Our proposed data structure consists of several tables that each one would be filled with prefixes with respect to their address length. Storing such tables makes possible accessing multiple threads simultaneously to memory. Simulation results show that search cost in our proposed method in comparison with existing methods is decreased.