IP address lookup algorithm using a vectored bloom filter

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient data structure popularly applied in many network algorithms. This paper proposes a vectored Bloom filter to provide a high-speed Internet protocol (IP) address lookup. While each hash index for a Bloom filter indicates one bit, which is used to identify the membership of the input, each index of the proposed vectored Bloom filter indicates a vector which is used to represent the membership and the output port for the input. Hence the proposed Bloom filter can complete the IP address lookup without accessing an off-chip hash table for most cases. Simulation results show that with a reasonable sized Bloom filter that can be stored using an on-chip memory, an IP address lookup can be performed with less than 0.0003 off-chip accesses on average in our proposed architecture.