Storage Efficient and Power Optimized TCAM Based Architecture for Forwarding IP Packets
Alireza Mahini, Reza Berangi, Hossein Mohtashami, Mohammad Salah Esfahani and Hamidreza Mahini
International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS 2007)
San Diego, California (USA), July 16-18, 2007
SPECTS_Summary
Ternary Content-Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are becoming very popular for designing high-throughput address lookup engines on routers: they are fast, cost-effective and simple to manage. Despite the TCAMs speed, their high power consumption is their major drawback. In this document, a power efficient TCAM based hardware architecture has been proposed. This scheme is employed after an Espresso-II minimization algorithm to achieve lower power consumption. The model works for IPv4 and IPv6 packet forwarding and the performance evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it can save considerable amount of routing table’s power consumption.