Exact Forwarding Table Partitioning for Efficient TCAM Power Savings

Abstract

Excessive power consumption is deemed one of the major drawbacks of TCAM-based IP search engines. This paper proposes a simple and yet efficient forwarding table partitioning algorithm aiming to achieve significant TCAM power savings. Our algorithm partitions the IP address space into a set of adjoining but non-overlapping search ranges comprising an exactly identical number of prefixes to be accommodated in a TCAM segment, dubbed exact table partitioning (ETAP). During a search operation, only one single range is examined to reduce overall TCAM power consumption substantially.