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Packet Classification on Multiple FieldsPankaj Gupta and Nick McKeown Routers classify packets to determine which flow they belong to, and to decide what service they should receive. Classification may, in general, be based on an arbitrary number of fields in the packet header. Performing classification quickly on an arbitrary number of fields is known to be difficult, and has poor worst-case performance. In this paper, we consider a number of classifiers taken from real networks. We find that the classifiers contain considerable structure and redundancy that can be exploited by the classification algorithm. In particular, we find that a simple multi-stage classification algorithm, called RFC (recursive flow classification), can classify 30 million packets per second in pipelined hardware, or one million packets per second in software. For information about joining SIGCOMM, follow this link The referenced paper appears in Computer Communication Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM, volume 29, number 4, October 1999. ACM Copyright Notice: Copyright (c) 1999 by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM) Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that the copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permission to publish from: Publications Dept. ACM, Inc. Fax +1 212 869 0481 or email at mailto:permission@acm.org |