High-speed Packet Classification with Efficient Parallel Range Match for IP network applications

Packet classification has been critical data path function for supporting Quality of Service (QoS), Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) and broad range of multimedia services. Hardware based solution is necessary to keep up with high-speed rate up to OC192 processing. However, the range match in multi-fields classification is still one of the bottleneck problems. In this paper, a novel structure called Range Match Block is designed. The Range Match Block stores range rules directly and performs range match parallel in each entry at high-speed. Experimental results show the Range Match Block can process about 66.7 Million Packets Per Second (Mpps). Furthermore, we propose a multi-field packet classification architecture based on Range Match Block and Ternary CAM. The architecture is well-suited for all kinds of network applications.