Wire Speed IPv6 Forwarding on Multi-core Platforms

Thilan Ganegedara, Viktor K. Prasanna

Abstract: With the exhaustion of IPv4 (32 bit) address space, IPv6 (128 bit) addressing is emerging to facilitate the immense growth of the Internet. However, this poses two main challenges to high-speed routers that perform packet forwarding: 1) increased IP lookup complexity and 2) increased routing table storage requirements. In this work, we present a high-performance IPv6 lookup engine based on routing table partitioning using an algorithm we devised, and range-tree search, for backbone networks. The disjoint partitioning improves the parallelism of the IP lookup process, which enables one to take advantage of software and hardware platforms with parallel processing capabilities. We use two state-of-the-art multi-core platforms and show that the proposed solution is able to operate at 150+ Gbps throughput rates for a 2 million entry routing table. Further, we show that the solution is scalable even up to 8 million entry routing tables while sustaining 40+ Gbps rates.