• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.36 no.11B
• /
• pp.1285-1296
• /
• 2011

Packet classification is one of the basic and important functions of the Internet routers, and it became more important along with new emerging application programs requiring real-time transmission. Since packet classification should be accomplished in line-speed on each incoming input packet for multiple header fields, it becomes one of the challenges in designing Internet routers. Various packet classification algorithms have been proposed to provide the high-speed packet classification. Hierarchical approach achieves effective packet classification performance by significantly narrowing down the search space whenever a field lookup is completed. However, hierarchical approach involves back-tracking problem. In order to solve the problem, set-pruning trie and grid-of-trie algorithms are proposed. However, the algorithm either causes excessive node duplication or heavy pre-computation. In this paper, we propose a smart set-pruning trie which reduces the number of node duplication in the set-pruning trie by the simple merging of the lower-level tries. Simulation result shows that the proposed trie has the reduced number of copied nodes by 2-8% compared with the set-pruning trie.