Hardware-based packet classification made fast and efficient

To achieve fast packet classification, a hardware-based scheme, cross-producting recurrence (CPR), based on a formerly proposed cross-producting scheme is proposed. This scheme simplifies the classification procedure and decrease the distinct combinations of fields by hierarchically decomposing the multi-dimensional space. In the new scheme, the multi-dimensional space is endowed with a hierarchical property which self-divides into several smaller subspaces, whereas the procedure of packet classification is translated into repeatedly searching for matching subspaces. The required storage of the proposed scheme is significantly reduced since the distinct fields of subspaces is controlled by a pre-defined configuration and can be much less than that of the filters. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed scheme.