Scalable Balanced Pipelined IPv6 Lookup Algorithm

One of the most critical router’s functions is the IP lookup. For each incoming IP packet, IP lookup determines the output port to which the packet should be forwarded. IPv6 addresses are envisioned to replace IPv4 addresses because the IPv4 address space is exhausted. Therefore, modern IP routers need to support IPv6 lookup. Most of the existing IP lookup algorithms are adjusted for the IPv4 lookup, but not for the IPv6 lookup. Scalability represents the main problem in the existing IP lookup algorithms because the IPv6 address space is much larger than the IPv4 address space due to longer IPv6 addresses. In this paper, we propose a novel IPv6 lookup algorithm that supports very large IPv6 lookup tables and achieves high IP lookup throughput.