(A) study on packet classification : high performance longest prefix matches for IP address lookups

Abstract

Various contents and multimedia services have been supplied to many people through WWW(World Wide Web) which is accessed conveniently by using any kind of web browsers. So, the Internet becomes really a necessary tool for the mass of people to gather information and to enjoy their cultural life. As the Internet gets popularity like this, the number of hosts connecting to it increases exponentially. The appearance of new multimedia services and increment of hosts and users mean that the amount of traffic passing the Internet becomes very large volume. Hence, the previous Inter-net infrastructure which supply low bandwidth for data service, has been much stressed. Also, quality of services is degraded because multimedia applications consume most of the network bandwidth. Approaches enhancing quality of services for the Internet applications are classified into three directions. The first approach is to substitute trans-mission medium from copper wires to optical fibers which offer much higher bandwidth capacity. However, even if physical medium become very fast, their bandwidth would not be useful when a router``s packet processing capacity is low. This is because routers are interconnecting nodes between a network and another network. In this case, routers become bottleneck points of high speed communications, and the overall performance of entire networks cannot be improved. If router``s packet processing capacity increases to the degree fully utilizing the bandwidth supplied by transmission medium, various applications serviced on the Internet will be serviced much better than now. And this is the second approach to enhance quality of services of the Internet. The third approach is to change protocol from the pure IP (Internet Protocol) to the more sophisticated protocols which can supply quality of services. RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol), IntServ (Integrated Service), and DiffServ (Differentiated Service) are the good examples of these protocols. In th...