TAR: Traffic Adaptive IPv6 Routing Lookup Scheme

Xinyi Zhang, Zhiyuan Xu, Huaiyi Zhao, Yanbiao Li, Gaogang Xie

Abstract: IP lookup aims at identifying the longest prefix match within routing tables to determine the forwarding path for packets. The increase in IPv6 address length makes IP lookup particularly difficult, requiring more efficient lookup mechanisms to handle the expanded address space and ensure the timely and accurate routing of packets. Existing IPv6 lookup algorithms focus on constructing efficient data structures to enhance lookup performance. However, given the inherent characteristics of network traffic distribution and the varying hit probabilities of nodes within the lookup structure, there is still room for optimization. Our study introduces a new IPv6 routing lookup scheme that utilizes the characteristics of network traffic to guide the construction of lookup data structures. Experimental results indicate that the lookup performance of the traffic-adaptive algorithm is 1.1 to 2.2 times that of conventional algorithms. Additionally, our work designs a traffic-adaptive routing system, which includes an adaptive cache structure capable of responding to dynamic changes in network traffic. The throughput of our proposed system is 1.7 to 2.8 times that of systems implementing only basic algorithms.