An Associative Cache Scheme for Internet IP Routing

摘要

In this paper a study of a high-performance associative cache scheme for Internet IP routing is presented. This is the first study that deals with an associative cache for this application. Our study shows that an associative cache provides an output port at the speed of one memory access with a close to 80% hit rate. The worst error rate is just 2.83% when 32 sets are used. The scheme does not imposes additional delays to IP routing schemes since the same address that is sent to the routing tables is used for the cache. The scheme, however, improves the performance of the router. The proposed associative cache IP router scheme introduces a flexible set size. In our scheme we allow some sets to be a lot larger than others to accommodate the demands of higher number of entries per set.