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Packet Classification on Multiple Fields

Pankaj Gupta and Nick McKeown
Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University

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.

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The referenced paper appears in Computer Communication Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM, volume 29, number 4, October 1999.

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