Flexible Hardware Support for Gigabit Routing

Routers and Switches are key building blocks of global networks. Data rates in the range of multiple gigabit per second are flowing trough them and emerging router functionalities (active networking, layer 4 switching, ...) require fast and efficient routers. Therefore, hardware support is needed in order to speed up the performance critical forwarding task.This paper presents a flexible hardware support and its application for one of the most performance critical parts of a router: the routing table and its search algorithms. The basic principles and components of the hardware platform are outlined. Based on this platform a simple but efficient organization of the routing table and an appropriate search algorithm is presented. Furthermore, hardware support for upcoming router tasks such as RSVP classifier state handling and active networking support is outlined.