Improved IP Lookup Technology for Trie-Based Data Structures

Many Internet protocol (IP) lookup algorithms have been formulated to improve network performance. This study reviewed and experimentally evaluated technologies for trie-based methods that reduce memory access, memory consumption and IP lookup time. Experiments involving binary tries (for simplicity) were conducted on four real-world data sets, two of which were on IPv4 router tables (855,997 and 876,489 active prefixes) and two of which were on IPv6 router tables (155,310 and 157,579 active prefixes). Technologies designed to reduce time taken (at the expense of memory consumption) worked well for IPv4, and those designed to reduce memory consumption worked well for IPv6. Various combinations of these technologies were applied together in the experiments.