Caesar: high-speed and memory-efficient forwarding engine for future internet architecture

In response to the critical challenges of the current Internet architecture and its protocols, a set of so-called clean slate designs has been proposed. Common among them is an addressing scheme that separates location and identity with self-certifying, flat and non-aggregatable address components. Each component is long, reaching a few kilobits, and would consume an amount of fast memory in data plane devices (e.g., routers) that is far beyond existing capacities. To address this challenge, we present Caesar, a high-speed and length-agnostic forwarding engine for future border routers, performing most of the lookups within three fast memory accesses. To compress forwarding states, Caesar constructs scalable and reliable Bloom filters in Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM). To guarantee correctness, Caesar detects false positives at high speed and develops a blacklisting approach to handling them. In addition, we optimize our design by introducing a hashing scheme that reduces the number of hash computations from k to log(k) per lookup based on hash coding theory. We handle routing updates while keeping filters highly utilized in address removals. We perform extensive analysis and simulations using real traffic and routing traces to demonstrate the benefits of our design. Our evaluation shows that Caesar is more energy-efficient and less expensive (in terms of total cost) compared to optimized IPv6 TCAM-based solutions by up to 67% and 43% respectively. In addition, the total cost of our design is approximately the same for various address lengths.