100+ Gbps IPv6 packet forwarding on multi-core platforms

The migration from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing is gradually taking place with the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. This requires the network infrastructure to have the capability to process and route IPv6 packets. However, with the increased complexity of the lookup operation and storage requirements, performing IPv6 lookup at wire-speed is challenging. In this work, we propose a high-performance IPv6 lookup engine solution for multi-core platforms that deliver state-of-the-art line card throughput rates. In order to exploit the parallelism offered on modern multi-core platforms, we propose a routing table partitioning scheme that forms disjoint and balanced partitions, given a IPv6 routing table. These partitions are represented as range trees to perform the lookup operation. Due to the disjoint nature of the proposed partitioning scheme, the individual range trees are able to operate independently, improving the parallelism of the lookup engine. Our experimental results on state-of-the-art multi-core processors show that throughputs of 100+ Gbps can be achieved for 2 million entry IPv6 routing tables using the proposed scheme. Compared with existing literature, the proposed solution achieves 10× higher throughput and is on par with performance delivered by hardware IP lookup engines.