MLET: A Power Efficient Approach for TCAM Based, IP Lookup Engines in Internet Routers

Routers are one of the important entities in computer networks specially the Internet. Forwarding IPpackets is a valuable and vital function in Internet routers. Routers extract destination IP addressfrom packets and lookup those addresses in their own routing table. This task is called IP lookup.Internet address lookup is a challenging problem due to the increasingrouting table sizes. TernaryContent-Addressable Memories (TCAMs)are becoming very popular for designing high-throughputaddress lookupengines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite theTCAMs speed, their high power consumption is their major drawback. In this paper, MultilevelEnabling Technique (MLET), a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has beenproposed. This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithm to achieve lowerpower consumption. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can saveconsiderable amount of routing table’s power consumption.