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Main Authors: Chang, Robert, Dogga, Pradeep, Fingerhut, Andy, Rios, Victor, Varghese, George
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03003
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author Chang, Robert
Dogga, Pradeep
Fingerhut, Andy
Rios, Victor
Varghese, George
author_facet Chang, Robert
Dogga, Pradeep
Fingerhut, Andy
Rios, Victor
Varghese, George
contents Wide-area scaling trends require new approaches to Internet Protocol (IP) lookup, enabled by modern networking chips such as Intel Tofino, AMD Pensando, and Nvidia BlueField, which provide substantial ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM). However, designing and evaluating scalable algorithms for these chips is challenging due to hardware-level constraints. To address this, we introduce the CRAM (CAM+RAM) lens, a framework that combines a formal model for evaluating algorithms on modern network processors with a set of optimization idioms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CRAM by designing and evaluating three new IP lookup schemes: RESAIL, BSIC, and MashUp. RESAIL enables Tofino-2 to scale to 2.25 million IPv4 prefixes$\unicode{x2014}$likely sufficient for the next decade$\unicode{x2014}$while a pure TCAM approach supports only 250k prefixes, just 27% of the current global IPv4 routing table. Similarly, BSIC scales to 390k IPv6 prefixes on Tofino-2, supporting 3.2 times as many prefixes as a pure TCAM implementation. In contrast, existing state-of-the-art algorithms, SAIL for IPv4 and Hi-BST for IPv6, scale to considerably smaller sizes on Tofino-2.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_03003
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling IP Lookup to Large Databases using the CRAM Lens
Chang, Robert
Dogga, Pradeep
Fingerhut, Andy
Rios, Victor
Varghese, George
Networking and Internet Architecture
Wide-area scaling trends require new approaches to Internet Protocol (IP) lookup, enabled by modern networking chips such as Intel Tofino, AMD Pensando, and Nvidia BlueField, which provide substantial ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM). However, designing and evaluating scalable algorithms for these chips is challenging due to hardware-level constraints. To address this, we introduce the CRAM (CAM+RAM) lens, a framework that combines a formal model for evaluating algorithms on modern network processors with a set of optimization idioms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CRAM by designing and evaluating three new IP lookup schemes: RESAIL, BSIC, and MashUp. RESAIL enables Tofino-2 to scale to 2.25 million IPv4 prefixes$\unicode{x2014}$likely sufficient for the next decade$\unicode{x2014}$while a pure TCAM approach supports only 250k prefixes, just 27% of the current global IPv4 routing table. Similarly, BSIC scales to 390k IPv6 prefixes on Tofino-2, supporting 3.2 times as many prefixes as a pure TCAM implementation. In contrast, existing state-of-the-art algorithms, SAIL for IPv4 and Hi-BST for IPv6, scale to considerably smaller sizes on Tofino-2.
title Scaling IP Lookup to Large Databases using the CRAM Lens
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03003